David W. Anthony The Horse, The Wheel, And Language How Bronze Age Riders From The Eurasian Steppes Shaped The Modern World 2007

THE

HORSE

THE

WHEEL

AND

HOW

BRONZE-AGE RIDERS

FROM THE

EURASIAN STEPPES

SHAPED THE

MODERN WORLD

DAVID W. ANTHONY

Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford

Univerzitna kniznica
v Bratislave

33. 3 . 0662 * 1 -

‘ 1800367342 *

Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock,
Oxfordshire 0X20 1 SY

All Rights Reserved

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-05887-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007932082

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Adobe Caslon

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press.princeton.edu

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Univerzimd knifcnicn
BRATISLAVA

1 o nnno

CONTENTS

k

Acknowledgments xi

PART ONE

Language and Archaeology 1

Chapter One

The Promise and Politics of the Mother Tongue 3
Ancestors 3

Linguists and Chauvinists 6
The Lure of the Mother Tongue 11
A New Solution for an Old Problem 15
Language Extinction and Thought 19

Chapter Two

How to Reconstruct a Dead Language 21

Language Change and Time 22
Phonology: How to Reconstruct a Dead Sound 24
The Lexicon: How to Reconstruct Dead Meanings 32
Syntax and Morphology: The Shape of a Dead Language 36
Conclusion: Raising a Language from the Dead 38

Chapter Three

Language and Time 1:

The Last Speakers of Proto-Indo-European 39

The Size of the Chronological Window:

How Long Do Languages Last? 39
The Terminal Date for Proto-Indo-European:

The Mother Becomes Her Daughters 42
The Oldest and Strangest Daughter (or Cousin?): Anatolian 43
The Next Oldest Inscriptions : Greek and Old Indie 48
Counting the Relatives: How Many in 1500 BCE? 50

vi Contents

Chapter Four

Language and Time 2:

Wool, Wheels, and Proto-Indo-European 59

The Wool Vocabulary 59
The Wheel Vocabulary 63
When Was the Wheel Invented 65
The Significance of the Wheel 12
Wagons and the Anatolian Homeland Hypothesis 75
The Birth and Death of Proto-Indo-European 81

Chapter Five

Language and Place:

The Location of the Proto-Indo-European Homeland 83

Problems with the Concept of The Homeland" 83
Finding the Homeland: Ecology and Environment 89
Finding the Homeland: The Economic and Social Setting 91
Finding the Homeland: Uralic and Caucasian Connections 93
The Location of the Proto-Indo-European Homeland 98

Chapter Six

The Archaeology of Language 102
Persistent Frontiers 104

Migration as a Cause of Persistent Material-Culture
Frontiers 108

Ecological Frontiers: Different Ways of Making a Living 114
Small-scale Migrations, Elite Recruitment ,
and Language Shift 117

PART TWO

The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes 121

Chapter Seven

How to Reconstruct a Dead Culture 123

The Three Ages in the Pontic-Caspian Steppes 125
Dating and the Radiocarbon Revolution 126
What Did They Eat? 128

Contents vii

Archaeological Cultures and Living Cultures 130
The Big Questions Ahead 132

Chapter Eight

First Farmers and Herders: The Pontic-Caspian Neolithic 134

Domesticated Animals and Pontic-Caspian Ecology 135
The First Farmer-Forager Frontier in the
Pontic-Caspian Region 138
Farmer Meets Forager: The Bug-Dniester Culture 14 7
Beyond the Frontier: Pontic-Caspian Foragers
before Cattle Arrived 154
The Gods Give Cattle 158

Chapter Nine

Cows, Copper, and Chiefs 160

The Early Copper Age in Old Europe 162
The Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture 164
The Dnieper-Donets LI Culture 1 74
The Khvalynsk Culture on the Volga 182
Nalchik and North Caucasian Cultures 186
The Lower Don and North Caspian Steppes 188
The Forest Frontier : The Samara Culture 189
Cows, Social Power, and the Emergence of Tribes 190

Chapter Ten

The Domestication of the Horse and the Origins of Riding:
The Tale of the Teeth 193

Where Were Horses First Domesticated ? 196
Why Were Horses Domesticated ? 200
What Is a Domesticated Horse? 201
Bit Wear and Horseback Riding 206
Indo-European Migrations and Bit Wear at Dereivka 213
Botai and Eneolithic Horseback Riding 216
The Origin of Horseback Riding 221
The Economic and Military Effects of Horseback Riding 222

viii Contents

Chapter Eleven

The End of Old Europe and the Rise of the Steppe 225
Warfare and Alliance:

The Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture and the Steppes 230
The Sredni Stog Culture: Horses and Rituals from the East 239
Migrations into the Danube Valley:

The Suvorovo-Novodanilovka Complex 249
Warfare , Climate Change , and Language
Shift in the Lower Danube Valley 258
After the Collapse 260

Chapter Twelve

Seeds of Change on the Steppe Borders:

Maikop Chiefs and Tripolye Towns 263

The Five Cultures of the Final Eneolithic in the Steppes 2 65
Crisis and Change on the Tripolye Frontier:

Towns Bigger Than Cities 277
The First Cities and Their Connection to the Steppes 282
The North Caucasus Piedmont:

E?ieolithic Farmers before Maikop 285
The Maikop Culture 2S7
Maikop-Novosvobodnaya in the Steppes:

Contacts with the North 295
Proto-Indo-European as a Regional
Language in a Changing World 299

Chapter Thirteen

Wagon Dwellers of the Steppe:

The Speakers of Proto-Indo-European 300

Why Not a Kurgan Culture ? 306
Beyond the Eastern Frontier:

The Afanasievo Migration to the Altai 307
Wagon Graves in the Steppes 311
Where Did the Yamnaya Horizon Begin? 317
When Did the Yamnaya Horizon Begin? 321
Were the Yamnaya People Nomads? 321

Contents ix

Yamnaya Social Organization 328
The Stone Stelae of the North Pontic Steppes 336

Chapter Fourteen

The Western Indo-European Languages 340

The End of the Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture and
the Roots of the Western Branches 343
Steppe Overlords and Tripolye Clients:

The Usatovo Culture 349

The Yamnaya Migration up the Danube Valley 361
Yamnaya Contacts with the Corded Ware Horizon 367
The Origins of Greek 368
Conclusion: The Early Western Indo-European
Languages Disperse 369

Chapter Fifteen

Chariot Warriors of the Northern Steppes 371

The End of the Forest Frontier:

Corded Ware Herders in the Forest 375
Pre-Sintashta Cultures of the Eastern Steppes 385
The Origin of the Sintashta Culture 389
Warfare in the Sintashta Culture:
Fortifications and Weapons 393
Tournaments of Value 405
Sintashta and the Origins of the Aryans 408

Chapter Sixteen

The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes 412

Bronze Age Empires and the Horse Trade 412
The Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex 421
The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes 435
The Srubnaya Culture:

Herding and Gathering in the Western Steppes 437
East of the Urals , Phase I: The Petrovka Culture 441
The Seima-Turbino Horizon in the Forest-Steppe Zone 443

x Contents

East of the Urals , Phase II: The Andronovo Horizon 448
Proto-Vedic Cultures in the Central Asian Contact Zone 452
The Steppes Become a Bridge across Eurasia 456

Chapter Seventeen

Words and Deeds 458

The Horse and the Wheel 459
Archaeology and Language 463

Appendix: Author s Note on Radiocarbon Dates 467
Notes 471
References 507
Index 547

■

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been written without the love and support of my
mother and father, David F. and Laura B. Anthony. Laura B. Anthony
read and commented on every chapter. Bernard Wailes drew me into the
University of Pennsylvania, led me into my first archaeological excavation,
and taught me to respect the facts of archaeology. I am blessed with Dor-
cas Brown as my partner, editor, critic, fellow archaeologist, field excava-
tion co-director, lab director, illustrator, spouse, and best friend through
thick and thin. She edited every chapter multiple times. All the maps and
figures are by D. Brown. Much of the content in chapters 10 and 16 was
the product of our joint research, published over many years. Dorcass
brother, Dr. Ben Brown, also helped to read and edit the ms.

The bit-wear research described in chapter 10 and the field work associated
with the Samara Valley Project (chapter 16) was supported by grants from
Hartwick College, the Freedman and Fortis Foundations, the American
Philosophical Society, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Geo-
graphic Society, the Russian Institute of Archaeology (Moscow), the Insti-
tute for the History and Archaeology of the Volga (Samara), and the National
Science Foundation (United States), with assistance for chapter 10 from the
State University of New York at Cobleskill. We are particularly grateful to
the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Support to write this book was provided by a fellowship from the Na-
tional Endowment for the Humanities in 1999-2000 and a membership
in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study
(IAS) at Princeton, New Jersey, in 2006, where Nicola DiCosmo and
Patricia Crone made us welcome. The term at the IAS was crucial.

People who have helped me in numerous different ways include:

Near East and East Asia: Kathy Linduff, Victor Mair, Oscar Muscarella,
Karen Rubinson, Chris Thornton, Lauren Zych, C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky,
Fred Hiebert, Phil Kohl, Greg Possehl, Glenn Schwartz, David Owen,
Mitchell Rothman, Emmy Bunker, Nicola DiCosmo, and Peter Golden.

Horses and wheeled vehicles: Dexter Perkins and Pat Daly; §andor
Bokonyi, Sandra Olsen, Mary Littauer and Joost Crouwel (my instructors
in ancient transport); and Peter Raulwing, Norbert Benecke, and Mindy
Zeder.

xii Acknowledgments

Bit wear and the riding experiment: Mindy Zeder, Ron Keiper; the
Bureau of Land Management, Winnemucca, Nevada; Cornell University
Veterinary School; University of Pennsylvania New Bolton Center; the
Assateague Island Wildlife Refuge; and, at the State University of New
York at Cobleskill, Steve MacKenzie, Stephanie Skargensky, and Michelle
Beyea.

Linguistics: Ward Goodenough, Edgar Polome, Richard Diebold, Win-
frid Lehmann, Alexander Lubotsky, Don Ringe, Stefan Zimmer, and Eric
Hamp. A special thanks to Johanna Nichols, who helped edit chapter 5,
and J. Bill Darden and Jim Mallory, who reviewed the first draft.

Eastern European archaeology: Petar Glumac (who made me believe
I could read Russian-language sources), Peter Bogucki, Douglass Bailey
(who reviewed chapter 11), Ruth Tringham (who gave me my first field ex-
perience in Eastern Europe), Victor Shnirelman (our first guide in Russia),
Dimitri Telegin (my first source on steppe archaeology), Natalya Belan,
Oleg Zhuravlev, Yuri Rassamakin, Mikhail Videiko, Igor Vasiliev, Pavel
Kuznetsov, Oleg Mochalov, Aleksandr Khokhlov, Pavel Kosintsev, Elena
Kuzmina, Sergei Korenevskii, Evgeni Chernykh, R. Munchaev, Nikolai
Vinogradov, Victor Zaibert, Stanislav Grigoriev, Andrei Epimakhov, Val-
entin Dergachev, and Ludmila Koryakova. Of these I owe the deepest debts
to Telegin (my first guide) and my colleagues in Samara: Vasiliev, Kuznetsov,
Mochalov, Khokhlov, and (honorary Samaran) Kosintsev.

The errors I have made are mine alone; these people tried their best.

PART ONE

Language and Archaeology

Chapter One

The Promise and Politics
of the Mother Tongue

Ancestors

When you look in the mirror you see not just your face but a museum.
Although your face, in one sense, is your own, it is composed of a collage
of features you have inherited from your parents, grandparents, great-
grandparents, and so on. The lips and eyes that either bother or please you
are not yours alone but are also features of your ancestors, long dead per-
haps as individuals but still very much alive as fragments in you. Even
complex qualities such as your sense of balance, musical abilities, shyness
in crowds, or susceptibility to sickness have been lived before. We carry
the past around with us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives also
in our customs, including the way we speak. The past is a set of invisible
lenses we wear constantly, and through these we perceive the world and
the world perceives us. We stand always on the shoulders of our ancestors,
whether or not we look down to acknowledge them.

It is disconcerting to realize how few of our ancestors most of us can
recognize or even name. You have four great-grandmothers, women suf-
ficiently close to you genetically that you see elements of their faces, and
skin, and hair each time you see your reflection. Each had a maiden
name she heard spoken thousands of times, and yet you probably cannot
recall any one of their maiden names. If we are lucky, we may find their
birth names in genealogies or documents, although war, migration, and
destroyed records have made that impossible for many Americans. Our
four great-grandmothers had full lives, families, and bequeathed to us
many of our most personal qualities, but we have lost these ancestors so
completely that we cannot even name them. How many of us can imag-
ine being so utterly forgotten just three generations from now by our

4 Chapter i

The Mother Tongue 5

own descendents that they remember nothing of us not even our
names?

In traditional societies, where life is still structured around family, ex-
tended kin, and the village, people often are more conscious of the debts
they owe their ancestors, even of the power of their ghosts and spirits.
Zafimaniry women in rural Madagascar weave complicated patterns on
their hats, which they learned from their mothers and aunts. The patterns
differ significantly between villages. The women in one village told the
anthropologist Maurice Bloch that the designs were “pearls from the an-
cestors.” Even ordinary Zafimaniry houses are seen as temples to the spir
its of the people who made them. 1 This constant acknowledgment of the
power of those who lived before is not part of the thinking of most mod-
ern, consumer cultures. We live in a world that depends for its economic
survival on the constant adoption and consumption of new things. Ar-
chaeology, history, genealogy, and prayer are the overflowing drawers into
which we throw our thoughts of earlier generations.

Archaeology is one way to acknowledge the humanity and importance
of the people who lived before us and, obliquely, of ourselves. It is the only
discipline that investigates the daily texture of past lives not described in
writing, indeed the great majority of the lives humans have lived. Archae
ologists have wrested surprisingly intimate details out of the silent remains
of the preliterate past, but there are limits to what we can know about
people who have left no written accounts of their opinions, their conversa-
tions, or their names.

Is there a way to overcome those limits and recover the values and be-
liefs that were central to how prehistoric people really lived their lives?
Did they leave clues in some other medium? Many linguists believe they
did, and that the medium is the very language we use every day. Our lan-
guage contains a great many fossils that are the remnants of surprisingly
ancient speakers. Our teachers tell us that these linguistic fossils are “ir-
regular” forms, and we just learn them without thinking. We all know
that a past tense is usually constructed by adding -t or -ed to the verb
(kick-kicked, miss-missed) and that some verbs require a change in the
vowel in the middle of the stem (run-ran, sing-sang). We are generally not
told, however, that this vowel change was the older, original way of mak-
ing a past tense. In fact, changing a vowel in the verb stem was the usual
way to form a past tense probably about five thousand years ago. Still, this
does not tell us much about what people were thinking then.

Are the words we use today actually fossils of peoples vocabulary of
about five thousand years ago? A vocabulary list would shine a bright light

on many obscure parts of the past. As the linguist Edward Sapir observed,
“The complete vocabulary of a language may indeed be looked upon as a
complex inventory of all the ideas, interests, and occupations that take up
the attention of the community.” 2 In fact, a substantial vocabulary list has
been reconstructed for one of the languages spoken about five thousand
years ago. That language is the ancestor of modern English as well as
many other modern and ancient languages. All the languages that are
descended from this same mother tongue belong to one family, that of the
Indo-European languages. Today Indo-European languages are spoken
by about three billion people — more than speak the languages of any
other language family. The vocabulary of the mother tongue, called “Proto-
Indo-European”, has been studied for about two hundred years, and in
those two centuries fierce disagreements have continued about almost
every aspect of Indo-European studies.

But disagreement produces light as well as heat. This book argues that
it is now possible to solve the central puzzle surrounding Proto-Indo-
European, namely, who spoke it, where was it spoken, and when. Genera-
tions of archaeologists and linguists have argued bitterly about the
“homeland” question. Many doubt the wisdom of even pursuing it. In the
past, nationalists and dictators have insisted that the homeland was in
their country and belonged to their own superior “race.” But today Indo-
European linguists are improving their methods and making new discov-
eries. They have reconstructed the basic forms and meanings of thousands
of words from the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary — itself an astonish-
ing feat. Those words can be analyzed to describe the thoughts, values,
concerns, family relations, and religious beliefs of the people who spoke
them. But first we have to figure out where and when they lived. If we can
combine the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary with a specific set of ar-
chaeological remains, it might be possible to move beyond the usual limi-
tations of archaeological knowledge and achieve a much richer knowledge
of these particular ancestors.

I believe with many others that the Proto-Indo-European homeland
was located in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas in what
is today southern Ukraine and Russia. The case for a steppe homeland is
stronger today than in the past partly because of dramatic new archaeo-
logical discoveries in the steppes. To understand the significance of an
Indo-European homeland in the steppes requires a leap into the compli-
cated and fascinating world of steppe archaeology. Steppe means “waste-
land in the language of the Russian agricultural state. The steppes
resembled the prairies of North America — a monotonous sea of grass

6 Chapter i

framed under a huge, dramatic sky. A continuous belt of steppes extends
from eastern Europe on the west (the belt ends between Odessa and Bu-
charest) to the Great Wall of China on the east, an arid corridor running
seven thousand kilometers across the center of the Eurasian continent.
This enormous grassland was an effective barrier to the transmission of
ideas and technologies for thousands of years. Like the North American
prairie, it was an unfriendly environment for people traveling on foot. And
just as in North America, the key that opened the grasslands was the
horse, combined in the Eurasian steppes with domesticated grazing
animals — sheep and cattle — to process the grass and turn it into useful
products for humans. Eventually people who rode horses and herded cattle
and sheep acquired the wheel, and were then able to follow their herds
almost anywhere, using heavy wagons to carry their tents and supplies.
The isolated prehistoric societies of China and Europe became dimly
aware of the possibility of one another’s existence only after the horse was
domesticated and the covered wagon invented. Together, these two inno-
vations in transportation made life predictable and productive for the
people of the Eurasian steppes. The opening of the steppe — its transfor-
mation from a hostile ecological barrier to a corridor of transcontinental
communication — forever changed the dynamics of Eurasian historical de-
velopment, and, this author contends, played an important role in the first
expansion of the Indo-European languages.

Linguists and Chauvinists

The Indo-European problem was formulated in one famous sentence by
Sir William Jones, a British judge in India, in 1786. Jones was already
widely known before he made his discovery. Fifteen years earlier, in 1771,
his Grammar of the Persian Language was the first English guide to the
language of the Persian kings, and it earned him, at the age of twenty-five,
the reputation as one of the most respected linguists in Europe. His trans-
lations of medieval Persian poems inspired Byron, Shelley, and the Euro-
pean Romantic movement. He rose from a respected barrister in Wales to
a correspondent, tutor, and friend of some of the leading men of the king-
dom. At age thirty-seven he was appointed one of the three justices of the
first Supreme Court of Bengal. His arrival in Calcutta, a mythically alien
place for an Englishman of his age, was the opening move in the imposi-
tion of royal government over a vital yet irresponsible merchant s colony.
Jones was to regulate both the excesses of the English merchants and the
rights and duties of the Indians. But although the English merchants at

The Mother Tongue y

least recognized his legal authority, the Indians obeyed an already func-
tioning and ancient system of Hindu law, which was regularly cited in
court by Hindu legal scholars, or pandits (the source of our term pundit ).
English judges could not determine if the laws the pandits cited really
existed. Sanskrit was the ancient language of the Hindu legal texts, like
Latin was for English law. If the two legal systems were to be integrated,
one of the new Supreme Court justices had to learn Sanskrit. That was
Jones.

He went to the ancient Hindu university at Nadiya, bought a vacation
cottage, found a respected and willing pandit (Ramalocana) on the fac-
ulty, and immersed himself in Hindu texts. Among these were the Vedas,
the ancient religious compositions that lay at the root of Hindu religion.
The Rig Veda , the oldest of the Vedic texts, had been composed long before
the Buddhas lifetime and was more than two thousand years old, but no
one knew its age exactly. As Jones pored over Sanskrit texts his mind
made comparisons not just with Persian and English but also with Latin
and Greek, the mainstays of an eighteenth-century university education;
with Gothic, the oldest literary form of German, which he had also
learned, and with Welsh, a Celtic tongue and his boyhood language which
he had not forgotten. In 1786, three years after his arrival in Calcutta,
Jones came to a startling conclusion, announced in his third annual dis-
course to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which he had founded when he
first arrived. The key sentence is now quoted in every introductory text-
book of historical linguistics (punctuation mine):

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful
structure: more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin,
and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them
a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of
grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so
strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three,
without believing them to have sprung from some common source,
which, perhaps, no longer exists.

Jones had concluded that the Sanskrit language originated from the
same source as Greek and Latin, the classical languages of European civi-
lization. He added that Persian, Celtic, and German probably belonged
to the same family. European scholars were astounded. The occupants of
India, long regarded as the epitome of Asian exotics, turned out to be
long-lost cousins. If Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit were relatives, descended
from the same ancient parent language, what was that language? Where

8 Chapter i

The Mother Tongue 9

had it been it spoken? And by whom? By what historical circumstances
did it generate daughter tongues that became the dominant languages
spoken from Scotland to India?

These questions resonated particularly deeply in Germany, where popu-
lar interest in the history of the German language and the roots ol Ger-
man traditions were growing into the Romantic movement. The Romantics
wanted to discard the cold, artificial logic of the Enlightenment to return
to the roots of a simple and authentic life based in direct experience and
community. Thomas Mann once said of a Romantic philosopher (Schle-
gel) that his thought was contaminated too much by reason, and that he
was therefore a poor Romantic. It was ironic that William Jones helped to
inspire this movement, because his own philosophy was quite different:
“The race of man . . . cannot long be happy without virtue, nor actively
virtuous without freedom, nor securely free without rational knowledge.” '
But Jones had energized the study of ancient languages, and ancient lan-
guage played a central role in Romantic theories of authentic experience.
In the 1780s J. G. Herder proposed a theory later developed by von Hum-
boldt and elaborated in the twentieth century by Wittgenstein, that lan-
guage creates the categories and distinctions through which humans give
meaning to the world. Each particular language, therefore, generates and
is enmeshed in a closed social community, or “folk, that is at its core
meaningless to an outsider. Language was seen by Herder and von Hum-
boldt as a vessel that molded community and national identities. The
brothers Grimm went out to collect “authentic” German folk tales while at
the same time studying the German language, pursuing the Romantic
conviction that language and folk culture were deeply related. In this set-
ting the mysterious mother tongue, Proto-Indo-European, was regarded
not just as a language but as a crucible in which Western civilization had
its earliest beginnings.

After the 1859 publication of Charles Darwins The Origin of Species, the
Romantic conviction that language was a defining factor in national iden-
tity was combined with new ideas about evolution and biology. Natural
selection provided a scientific theory that was hijacked by nationalists and
used to rationalize why some races or “folks” ruled others — some were
more “fit” than others. Darwin himself never applied his theories of fitness
and natural selection to such vague entities as races or languages, but this
did not prevent unscientific opportunists from suggesting that the less
“fit” races could be seen as a source of genetic weakness, a reservoir of bar-
barism that might contaminate and dilute the superior qualities of the
races that were more “fit.” This toxic mixture of pseudo-science and

Romanticism soon produced its own new ideologies. Language, culture,
and a Darwinian interpretation of race were bundled together to explain
the superior biological-spiritual-linguistic essence of the northern Euro-
peans who conducted these self-congratulatory studies. Their writings and
lectures encouraged people to think of themselves as members of long-
established, biological-linguistic nations, and thus were promoted widely
in the new national school systems and national newspapers of the emerg-
ing nation-states of Europe. The policies that forced the Welsh (including
Sir William Jones) to speak English, and the Bretons to speak French,
were rooted in politicians’ need for an ancient and “pure” national heritage
for each new state. The ancient speakers of Proto-Indo-European soon were
molded into the distant progenitors of such racial-linguistic-national stereo-
types . 4

Proto-Indo-European, the linguistic problem, became “the Proto-Indo-
Europeans,” a biological population with its own mentality and personal-
ity: “a slim, tall, light- complexioned, blonde race, superior to all other
peoples, calm and firm in character, constantly striving, intellectually
brilliant, with an almost ideal attitude towards the world and life in gen-
eral ”. 5 The name Aryan began to be applied to them, because the authors
of the oldest religious texts in Sanskrit and Persian, the Rig Veda and
Avesta, called themselves Aryans. These Aryans lived in Iran and east-
ward into Afghanistan-Pakistan-India. The term Aryan should be con-
fined only to this Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. But
the Vedas were a newly discovered source of mystical fascination in the
nineteenth century, and in Victorian parlors the name Aryan soon spread
beyond its proper linguistic and geographic confines. Madison Grants The
Passing of the Great Race (1916), a best-seller in the U.S., was a virulent
warning against the thinning of superior American “Aryan” blood (by
which he meant the British-Scots-Irish-German settlers of the original
thirteen colonies) through interbreeding with immigrant “inferior races,”
which for him included Poles, Czechs, and Italians as well as Jews — all of
whom spoke Indo-European languages (Yiddish is a Germanic language
in its basic grammar and morphology ). 6

The gap through which the word Aryan escaped from Iran and the
Indian subcontinent was provided by the Rig Veda itself: some scholars
found passages in the Rig Veda that seemed to describe the Vedic Aryans
as invaders who had conquered their way into the Punjab . 7 But from
where? A feverish search for the “Aryan homeland” began. Sir William
Jones placed it in Iran. The Himalayan Mountains were a popular choice
in the early nineteenth century, but other locations soon became the

The Mother Tongue u

io Chapter /

subject of animated debates. Amateurs and experts alike joined the
search, many hoping to prove that their own nation had given birth to
the Aryans. In the second decade of the twentieth century the German
scholar Gustav Kossinna attempted to demonstrate on archaeological
grounds that the Aryan homeland lay in northern Europe — in fact, in
Germany. Kossinna illustrated the prehistoric migrations of the “Indo-
Germanic” Aryans with neat black arrows that swept east, west, and
south from his presumed Aryan homeland. Armies followed the pen of
the prehistorian less than thirty years later. 8

The problem of Indo-European origins was politicized almost from the
beginning. It became enmeshed in nationalist and chauvinist causes, nur-
tured the murderous fantasy of Aryan racial superiority, and was actually
pursued in archaeological excavations funded by the Nazi SS. Today the
Indo-European past continues to be manipulated by causes and cults. In
the books of the Goddess movement (Marija Gimbutas’s Civilization of
the Goddess , Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade) the ancient “Indo-
Europeans” are cast in archaeological dramas not as blonde heroes but as
patriarchal, warlike invaders who destroyed a utopian prehistoric world
of feminine peace and beauty. In Russia some modern nationalist political
groups and neo-Pagan movements claim a direct linkage between them-
selves, as Slavs, and the ancient “Aryans.” In the United States white
supremacist groups refer to themselves as Aryans. There actually were
Aryans in history — the composers of the Rig Veda and the Avesta — but
they were Bronze Age tribal people who lived in Iran, Afghanistan, and
the northern Indian subcontinent. It is highly doubtful that they were
blonde or blue-eyed, and they had no connection with the competing
racial fantasies of modern bigots.*'

The mistakes that led an obscure linguistic mystery to erupt into racial
genocide were distressingly simple and therefore can be avoided by any-
one who cares to avoid them. They were the equation of race with lan-
guage, and the assignment of superiority to some language-and-race
groups. Prominent linguists have always pleaded against both these ideas.
While Martin Heidegger argued that some languages — German and
Greek — were unique vessels for a superior kind of thought, the linguistic
anthropologist Franz Boas protested that no language could be said to be
superior to any other on the basis of objective criteria. As early as 1872
the great linguist Max Muller observed that the notion of an Aryan skull
was not just unscientific but anti-scientific; languages are not white-
skinned or long-headed. But then how can the Sanskrit language be con-
nected with a skull type? And how did the Aryans themselves define

“Aryan”? According to their own texts, they conceived of “Aryan-ness” as
a religious-linguistic category. Some Sanskrit-speaking chiefs, and even
poets in the Rig Veda , had names such as Balbutha and Brbu that were
foreign to the Sanskrit language. These people were of non-Aryan origin
and yet were leaders among the Aryans. So even the Aryans of the Rig
Veda were not genetically “pure” — whatever that means. The Rig Veda was
a ritual canon, not a racial manifesto. If you sacrificed in the right way to
the right gods, which required performing the great traditional prayers in
the traditional language, you were an Aryan; otherwise you were not. The
Rig Veda made the ritual and linguistic barrier clear, but it did not require
or even contemplate racial purity. 10

Any attempt to solve the Indo-European problem has to begin with the
realization that the term Proto-Indo-European refers to a language com-
munity, and then work outward. Race really cannot be linked in any pre-
dictable way with language, so we cannot work from language to race or
from race to language. Race is poorly defined; the boundaries between
races are defined differently by different groups of people, and, since these
definitions are cultural, scientists cannot describe a “true” boundary be-
tween any two races. Also, archaeologists have their own, quite different
definitions of race, based on traits of the skull and teeth that often are
invisible in a living person. However race is defined, languages are not
normally sorted by race — all racial groups speak a variety of different lan-
guages. So skull shapes are almost irrelevant to linguistic problems. Lan-
guages and genes are correlated only in exceptional circumstances, usually
at clear geographic barriers such as significant mountain ranges or seas —
and often not even there. 11 A migrating population did not have to be ge-
netically homogeneous even if it did recruit almost exclusively from a
single dialect group. Anyone who assumes a simple connection between
language and genes, without citing geographic isolation or other special
circumstances, is wrong at the outset.

The Lure of the Mother Tongue

The only aspect of the Indo-European problem that has been answered to
most peoples’ satisfaction is how to define the language family, how to
determine which languages belong to the Indo-European family and
which do not. The discipline of linguistics was created in the nineteenth
century by people trying to solve this problem. Their principal interests
were comparative grammar, sound systems, and syntax, which provided
the basis for classifying languages, grouping them into types, and otherwise

PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN

The Mother Tongue ij

defining the relationships between the tongues of humanity. No one had
done this before. They divided the Indo-European language family into
twelve major branches, distinguished by innovations in phonology or pro-
nunciation and in morphology or word form that appeared at the root of
each branch and were maintained in all the languages of that branch (fig-
ure 1.1). The twelve branches of Indo-European included most of the
languages of Europe (but not Basque, Finnish, Estonian, or Magyar); the
Persian language of Iran; Sanskrit and its many modern daughters (most
important, Hindi and Urdu); and a number of extinct languages including
Hittite in Anatolia (modern Turkey) and Tocharian in the deserts of Xin-
jiang (northwestern China) (figure 1.2). Modern English, like Yiddish
and Swedish, is assigned to the Germanic branch. The analytic methods
invented by nineteenth-century philologists are today used to describe,
classify, and explain language variation worldwide.

Historical linguistics gave us not just static classifications but also the
ability to reconstruct at least parts of extinct languages for which no
written evidence survives. The methods that made this possible rely on
regularities in the way sounds change inside the human mouth. If you
collect Indo-European words for hundred from different branches of the
language family and compare them, you can apply the myriad rules of
sound change to see if all of them can be derived by regular changes
from a single hypothetical ancestral word at the root of all the branches.
The proof that Latin kentum (hundred) in the Italic branch and Lithua-
nian shimtas (hundred) in the Baltic branch are genetically related cog-
nates is the construction of the ancestral root *k'rptom-. The daughter
forms are compared sound by sound, going through each sound in each
word in each branch, to see if they can converge on one unique sequence
of sounds that could have evolved into all of them by known rules. (I ex-
plain how this is done in the next chapter.) That root sequence of sounds,
if it can be found, is the proof that the terms being compared are gene-
tically related cognates. A reconstructed root is the residue of a success-
ful comparison.

Figure 1.1 The twelve branches of the Indo-European language family. Baltic
and Slavic are sometimes combined into one branch, like Indo-Iranian, and
Phrygian is sometimes set aside because we know so little about it, like Illyr-
ian and Thracian. With those two changes the number of branches would be
ten, an acceptable alternative. A tree diagram is meant to be a sketch of broad
relationships; it does not represent a complete history.

Figure!. 2 The approximate geographic locations of the major Indo-European
branches at about 400 BCE.

Linguists have reconstructed the sounds of more than fifteen hundred
Proto-Indo-European roots. 12 The reconstructions vary in reliability, be-
cause they depend on the surviving linguistic evidence. On the other hand,
archeological excavations have revealed inscriptions in Hittite, Mycenaean
Greek, and archaic German that contained words, never seen before, dis-
playing precisely the sounds previously reconstructed by comparative lin-
guists. That linguists accurately predicted the sounds and letters later found
in ancient inscriptions confirms that their reconstructions are not entirely
theoretical. If we cannot regard reconstructed Proto-Indo-European as
literally “real,” it is at least a close approximation of a prehistoric reality.

The recovery of even fragments of the Proto-Indo-European language is
a remarkable accomplishment, considering that it was spoken by nonliter-
ate people many thousands of years ago and never was written down. Al-
though the grammar and morphology of Proto-Indo-European are most
important in typological studies, it is the reconstructed vocabulary, or
lexicon, that holds out the most promise for archaeologists. The recon-
structed lexicon is a window onto the environment, social life, and beliefs
of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European.

For example, reasonably solid lexical reconstructions indicate that
Proto-Indo-European contained words for otter, beaver, wolf, lynx, elk,
red deer, horse, mouse, hare, and hedgehog, among wild animals; goose,
crane, duck, and eagle, among birds; bee and honey; and cattle (also cow,

The Mother Tongue /j

ox, and steer), sheep (also wool and weaving), pig (also boar, sow, and piglet),
and dog among the domestic animals. The horse was certainly known to
the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, but the lexical evidence alone is
insufficient to determine if it was domesticated. All this lexical evidence
might also be attested in, and compared against, archaeological remains to
reconstruct the environment, economy, and ecology of the Proto-Indo-
European world.

But the proto-lexicon contains much more, including clusters of words,
suggesting that the speakers of PIE inherited their rights and duties
through the father’s bloodline only (patrilineal descent); probably lived
with the husband’s family after marriage (patrilocal residence); recognized
the authority of chiefs who acted as patrons and givers of hospitality for
their clients; likely had formally instituted warrior bands; practiced ritual
sacrifices of cattle and horses; drove wagons; recognized a male sky deity;
probably avoided speaking the name of the bear for ritual reasons; and
recognized two senses of the sacred (“that which is imbued with holiness”
and “that which is forbidden”). Many of these practices and beliefs are
simply unrecoverable through archaeology. The proto-lexicon offers the
hope of recovering some of the details of daily ritual and custom that ar-
chaeological evidence alone usually fails to deliver. That is what makes the
solution of the Indo-European problem important for archaeologists, and
for all of us who are interested in knowing our ancestors a little better.

A New Solution for an Old Problem

Linguists have been working on cultural-lexical reconstructions of Proto-
Indo-European for almost two hundred years. Archaeologists have argued
about the archaeological identity of the Proto-Indo-European language
community for at least a century, probably with less progress than the lin-
guists. The problem of Indo-European origins has been intertwined with
European intellectual and political history for considerably more than a
century. Why hasn’t a broadly acceptable union between archaeological
and linguistic evidence been achieved?

Six major problems stand in the way. One is that the recent intellectual
climate in Western academia has led many serious people to question the
entire idea of proto-languages. The modern world has witnessed increas-
ing cultural fusion in music (Black Ladysmith Mombasa and Paul Simon,
Pavarotti and Sting), in art (Post-Modern eclecticism), in information ser-
vices (News- Gossip), in the mixing of populations (international migra-
tion is at an all-time high), and in language (most of the people in the

16 Chapter i

world are now bilingual or trilingual). As interest in the phenomenon
of cultural convergence increased during the 1980s, thoughtful academics
began to reconsider languages and cultures that had once been interpreted
as individual, distinct entities. Even standard languages began to be seen
as creoles, mixed tongues with multiple origins. In Indo-European studies
this movement sowed doubt about the very concept of language families
and the branching tree models that illustrated them, and some declared
the search for any proto-language a delusion. Many ascribed the similari-
ties between the Indo-European languages to convergence between neigh-
boring languages that had distinct historical origins, implying that there
never was a single proto-language. 13

Much of this was creative but vague speculation. Linguists have now
established that the similarities between the Indo-European languages
are not the kinds of similarities produced by creolization and conver-
gence. None of the Indo-European languages looks at all like a creole.
The Indo-European languages must have replaced non-Indo-European
languages rather than creolizing with them. Of course, there was inter-
language borrowing, but it did not reach the extreme level of mixing and
structural simplification seen in all creoles. The similarities that Sir Wil-
liam Jones noted among the Indo-European languages can only have
been produced by descent from a common proto-language. On that point
most linguists agree.

So we should be able to use the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European
vocabulary as a source of clues about where it was spoken and when. But
then the second problem arises: many archaeologists, apparently, do not
believe that it is possible to reliably reconstruct any portion of the Proto-
Indo-European lexicon. They do not accept the reconstructed vocabulary
as real. This removes the principal reason for pursuing Indo-European
origins and one of the most valuable tools in the search. In the next chap-
ter I offer a defense of comparative linguistics, a brief explanation of how
it works, and a guide to interpreting the reconstructed vocabulary.

The third problem is that archaeologists cannot agree about the an-
tiquity of Proto-Indo-European. Some say it was spoken in 8000 BCE,
others say as late as 2000 BCE, and still others regard it as an abstract
idea that exists only in linguists’ heads and therefore cannot be assigned
to any one time. This makes it impossible, of course, to focus on a spe-
cific era. But the principal reason for this state of chronic disagreement
is that most archaeologists do not pay much attention to linguistics.
Some have proposed solutions that are contradicted by large bodies of
linguistic evidence. By solving the second problem, regarding the ques-

The Mother Tongue 17

tion of reliability and reality, we will advance significantly toward solv-
ing problem number 3 — the question of when — which occupies chapters
3 and 4.

The fourth problem is that archaeological methods are underdeveloped
in precisely those areas that are most critical for Indo-European origin
studies. Most archaeologists believe it is impossible to equate prehistoric
language groups with archaeological artifacts, as language is not reflected
in any consistent way in material culture. People who speak different lan-
guages might use similar houses or pots, and people who speak the same
language can make pots or houses in different ways. But it seems to me
that language and culture are predictably correlated under some circum-
stances. Where we see a very clear material-culture frontier — not just dif-
ferent pots but also different houses, graves, cemeteries, town patterns,
icons, diets, and dress designs — that persists for centuries or millennia, it
tends also to be a linguistic frontier. This does not happen everywhere. In
fact, such ethno-linguistic frontiers seem to occur rarely. But where a robust
material-culture frontier does persist for hundreds, even thousands of
years, language tends to be correlated with it. This insight permits us to
identify at least some linguistic frontiers on a map of purely archaeological
cultures, which is a critical step in finding the Proto-Indo-European
homeland.

Another weak aspect of contemporary archaeological theory is that
archaeologists generally do not understand migration very well, and mi-
gration is an important vector of language change — certainly not the
only cause but an important one. Migration was used by archaeologists
before World War II as a simple explanation for any kind of change ob-
served in prehistoric cultures: if pot type A in level one was replaced by
pot type B in level two, then it was a migration of B-people that had
caused the change. That simple assumption was proven to be grossly in-
adequate by a later generation of archaeologists who recognized the myr-
iad internal catalysts of change. Shifts in artifact types were shown to be
caused by changes in the size and complexity of social gatherings, shifts
in economics, reorganization in the way crafts were managed, changes in
the social function of crafts, innovations in technology, the introduction
of new trade and exchange commodities, and so on. “Pots are not people”
is a rule taught to every Western archaeology student since the 1960s.
Migration disappeared entirely from the explanatory toolkit of Western
archaeologists in the 1970s and 1980s. But migration is a hugely impor-
tant human behavior, and you cannot understand the Indo-European
problem if you ignore migration or pretend it was unimportant in the

18 Chapter i

past. I have tried to use modern migration theory to understand prehistoric
migrations and their probable role in language change, problems dis-
cussed in chapter 6.

Problem 5 relates to the specific homeland I defend in this book, located
in the steppe grasslands of Russia and Ukraine. The recent prehistoric ar-
chaeology of the steppes has been published in obscure journals and books,
in languages understood by relatively few Western archaeologists, and in a
narrative form that often reminds Western archaeologists of the old “pots
are people” archaeology of fifty years ago. I have tried to understand this
literature for twenty-five years with limited success, but I can say that So-
viet and post-Soviet archaeology is not a simple repetition of any phase of
Western archaeology; it has its own unique history and guiding assump-
tions. In the second half of this book I present a selective and unavoidably
imperfect synthesis of archaeology from the Neolithic, Copper, and
Bronze Ages in the steppe zone of Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan,
bearing directly on the nature and identity of early speakers of Indo-
European languages.

Horses gallop onstage to introduce the final, sixth problem. Scholars
noticed more than a hundred years ago that the oldest well-documented
Indo-European languages — Imperial Hittite, Mycenaean Greek, and the
most ancient form of Sanskrit, or Old Indie — were spoken by militaristic
societies that seemed to erupt into the ancient world driving chariots
pulled by swift horses. Maybe Indo-European speakers invented the char-
iot. Maybe they were the first to domesticate horses. Could this explain
the initial spread of the Indo-European languages? For about a thousand
years, between 1700 and 700 BCE, chariots were the favored weapons of
pharaohs and kings throughout the ancient world, from Greece to China.
Large numbers of chariots, in the dozens or even hundreds, are mentioned
in palace inventories of military equipment, in descriptions of battles, and
in proud boasts of loot taken in warfare. After 800 BCE chariots were
gradually abandoned as they became vulnerable to a new kind of warfare
conducted by disciplined troops of mounted archers, the earliest cavalry. If
Indo-European speakers were the first to have chariots, this could explain
their early expansion; if they were the first to domesticate horses, then this
could explain the central role horses played as symbols of strength and
power in the rituals of the Old Indie Aryans, Greeks, Hittites, and other
Indo-European speakers.

But until recently it has been difficult or impossible to determine when
and where horses were domesticated. Early horse domestication left very
few marks on the equine skeleton, and all we have left of ancient horses is

The Mother Tongue 1 9

their bones. For more than ten years I have worked on this problem with
my research partner, and also my wife, Dorcas Brown, and we believe we
now know where and when people began to keep herds of tamed horses.
We also think that horseback riding began in the steppes long before
chariots were invented, in spite of the fact that chariotry preceded cavalry
in the warfare of the organized states and kingdoms of the ancient
world.

Language Extinction and Thought

The people who spoke the Proto-Indo-European language lived at a criti-
cal time in a strategic place. They were positioned to benefit from innova-
tions in transport, most important of these the beginning of horseback
riding and the invention of wheeled vehicles. They were in no way superior
to their neighbors; indeed, the surviving evidence suggests that their
economy, domestic technology, and social organization were simpler than
those of their western and southern neighbors. The expansion of their lan-
guage was not a single event, nor did it have only one cause.

Nevertheless, that language did expand and diversify, and its daughters—
including English— continue to expand today. Many other language fam-
ilies have become extinct as Indo-European languages spread. It is possible
that the resultant loss of linguistic diversity has narrowed and channeled
habits of perception in the modern world. For example, all Indo-European
languages force the speaker to pay attention to tense and number when
talking about an action: you must specify whether the action is past, pres-
ent, or future; and you must specify whether the actor is singular or plural.
It is impossible to use an Indo-European verb without deciding on these
categories. Consequently speakers of Indo-European languages habitually
frame all events in terms of when they occurred and whether they involved
multiple actors. Many other language families do not require the speaker
to address these categories when speaking of an action, so tense and num-
ber can remain unspecified.

On the other hand, other language families require that other aspects
of reality be constantly used and recognized. For example, when de-
scribing an event or condition in Hopi you must use grammatical mark-
ers that specify whether you witnessed the event yourself, heard about
it from someone else, or consider it to be an unchanging truth. Hopi
speakers are forced by Hopi grammar to habitually frame all descrip-
tions of reality in terms of the source and reliability of their information.
The constant and automatic use of such categories generates habits in the

20 Chapter i

perception and framing of the world that probably differ between people
who use fundamentally different grammars. 14 In that sense, the spread
of Indo-European grammars has perhaps reduced the diversity of hu-
man perceptual habits. It might also have caused this author, as I write
this book, to frame my observations in a way that repeats the perceptual
habits and categories of a small group of people who lived in the western
Eurasian steppes more than five thousand years ago.

Chapter Two

How to Reconstruct a Dead Language

Proto-Indo-European has been dead as a spoken language for at least
forty-five hundred years. The people who spoke it were nonliterate, so
there are no inscriptions. Yet, in 1868, August Schleicher was able to tell a
story in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, called “The Sheep and the
Horses,” or Avis akvasas ka. A rewrite in 1939 by Herman Hirt incorpo-
rated new interpretations of Proto-Indo-European phonology, and the ti-
tle became Owis ekwoses-k w e. In 1979 Winfred Lehmann and Ladislav
Zgusta suggested only minor new changes in their version, Owis ekwosk^e.
While linguists debate increasingly minute details of pronunciation in
exercises like these, most people are amazed that anything can be said
about a language that died without written records. Amazement, of course,
is a close cousin of suspicion. Might the linguists be arguing over a fan-
tasy? In the absence of corroborative evidence from documents, how can
linguists be sure about the accuracy of reconstructed Proto-Indo-
European? 1

Many archaeologists, accustomed to digging up real things, have a low
opinion of those who merely reconstruct hypothetical phonemes — what is
called “linguistic prehistory.” There are reasons for this skepticism. Both
linguists and archaeologists have made communication across the disci-
plines almost impossible by speaking in dense jargons that are virtually
impenetrable to anyone but themselves. Neither discipline is at all simple,
and both are riddled with factions on many key questions of interpreta-
tion. Healthy disagreement can resemble confusion to an outsider, and
most archaeologists, including this author, are outsiders in linguistics.
Historical linguistics is not taught regularly in graduate archaeology pro-
grams, so most archaeologists know very little about the subject. Some-
times we make this quite clear to linguists. Nor is archaeology taught to
graduate students in linguistics. Linguists’ occasional remarks about ar-
chaeology can sound simplistic and naive to archaeologists, making some

22 Chapter 2

Reconstructing a Dead Language 23

of us suspect that the entire field of historical linguistics may be riddled
with simplistic and naive assumptions.

The purpose of these first few chapters is to clear a path across the no-
man’s land that separates archaeology and historical linguistics. I do this
with considerable uncertainty — I have no more formal training in linguis-
tics than most archaeologists. I am fortunate that a partial way has already
been charted by Jim Mallory, perhaps the only doubly qualified linguist-
archaeologist in Indo-European studies. The questions surrounding Indo-
European origins are, at their core, about linguistic evidence. The most
basic linguistic problem is to understand how language changes with
time. 2

Language Change and Time

Imagine that you had a time machine. If you are like me, there would be
many times and places that you would like to visit. In most of them, how-
ever, no one spoke English. If you could not afford the Six-Month
Immersion Trip to, say, ancient Egypt, you would have to limit yourself to
a time and place where you could speak the language. Consider, perhaps,
a trip to England. How far back in time could you go and still be under-
stood? Say we go to London in the year 1400 ce.

As you emerge from the time machine, a good first line to speak, some-
thing reassuring and recognizable, might be the opening line of the Lord s
Prayer. The first line in a conservative, old-fashioned version of Modern
Standard English would be, U 0ur Father, who is in heaven, blessed be your
name. In the English of 1400, as spoken by Chaucer, you would say, a Oure
fadir that art in heuenes, halwid be thy name .” Now turn the dial back
another four hundred years to 1000 CE, and in Old English, or Anglo-
Saxon, you would say, “Faader ure thu the eart on heofonum, si thin nama
gehalgod A chat with Alfred the Great would be out of the question.

Most normal spoken languages over the course of a thousand years un-
dergo enough change that speakers at either end of the millennium, at-
tempting a conversation, would have difficulty understanding each other.
Languages like Church Latin or Old Indie (the oldest form of Sanskrit),
frozen in ritual, would be your only hope for effective communication
with people who lived more than a thousand years ago. Icelandic is a fre-
quently cited example of a spoken language that has changed little in a
thousand years, but it is spoken on an island isolated in the North Atlantic
by people whose attitude to their old sagas and poetry has been one ap-
proaching religious reverence. Most languages undergo significantly more

changes than Icelandic over far fewer than a thousand years for two rea-
sons: first, no two people speak the same language exactly alike; and, sec-
ond, most people meet a lot more people who speak differently than do the
Icelanders. A language that borrows many words and phrases from an-
other language changes more rapidly than one with a low borrowing rate.
Icelandic has one of the lowest borrowing rates in the world. 3 If we are
exposed to a number of different ways of speaking, our own way of speak-
ing is likely to change more rapidly. Fortunately, however, although the
speed of language change is quite variable, the structure and sequence of
language change is not.

Language change is not random; it flows in the direction of accents and
phrases admired and emulated by large numbers of people. Once a target
accent is selected, the structure of the sound changes that moves the speaker
away from his own speech to the target is governed by rules. The same rules
apparently exist in all our minds, mouths, and ears. Linguists just noticed
them first. If rules define how a given innovation in pronunciation affects
the old speech system — if sound shifts are predictable — then we should be
able to play them backward, in effect, to hear earlier language states. That
is more or less how Proto-Indo-European was reconstructed.

Most surprising about sound change is its regularity, its conformation to
rules no one knows consciously. In early Medieval French there probably
was a time when tsent'm ‘hundred* was heard as just a dialectical pronun-
ciation of the Latin word kentum ‘hundred*. The differences in sound be-
tween the two were allophones , or different sounds that did not create
different meanings. But because of other changes in how Latin was spoken,
[ts-] began to be heard as a different sound, a phoneme distinct from [k-]
that could change the meaning of a word. At that point people had to de-
cide whether kentum was pronounced with a [k-] or a [ts-]. When French
speakers decided to use [ts-], they did so not just for the word kentum but in
every word where Latin had the sound k- before a front vowel like -e-. And
once this happened, ts- became confused with initial 5 -, and people had to
decide again whether tsentum was pronounced with a [ts-] or [s-]. They
chose [s-]. This sequence of shifts dropped below the level of consciousness
and spread like a virus through all pre-French words with analogous se-
quences of sounds. Latin cera ‘wax’, pronounced [kera], became French cire,
pronounced [seer]; and Latin civitas ‘community’, pronounced [kivitas],
became French cite', pronounced [seetay]. Other sound changes happened,
too, but they all followed the same unspoken and unconscious rules — the
sound shifts were not idiosyncratic or confined to certain words; rather,
they spread systematically to all similar sounds in the language. Peoples*

24 Chapter 2

Reconstructing a Dead Language 25

ears were very discriminating in identifying words that fit or did not fit the
analogy. In words where the Latin k- was followed by a hack vowel like -0 it
remained a k-, as in Latin costa> French cote.

Sound changes are rule-governed probably because all humans instinc-
tively search for order in language. This must be a hard-wired part of all
human brains. We do it without committee meetings, dictionaries, or even
literacy, and we are not conscious of what we are doing (unless we are lin-
guists). Human language is defined by its rules. Rules govern sentence
construction (syntax), and the relationship between the sounds of words
(phonology and morphology) and their meaning. Learning these rules
changes our awareness from that of an infant to a functioning member of
the human tribe. Because language is central to human evolution, culture,
and social identity, each member of the tribe is biologically equipped to
cooperate in converting novel changes into regular parts of the language
system. 4

Historical linguistics was created as a discipline in the nineteenth cen-
tury, when scholars first exposed and analyzed the rules we follow when
speaking and listening. I do not pretend to know these rules adequately,
and if I did I would not try to explain them all. What I hope to do is indi-
cate, in a general way, how some of them work so that we can use the re-
constructed vocabulary” of Proto-Indo-European with some awareness of
its possibilities and limitations.

We begin with phonology. Any language can be separated into several
interlocking systems, each with its own set of rules. The vocabulary, or
lexicon , composes one system; syntax , or word order, and sentence construc-
tion compose another; morphology , or word form, including much of what
is called “grammar” is the third; and phonology , or the rules about which
sounds are acceptable and meaningful, is the fourth. Each system has its
own peculiar tendencies, although a change in one (say, phonology) can
bring about changes in another (say, morphology). 5 We will look most
closely at phonology and the lexicon, as these are the most important in
understanding how the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary has been recon-
structed.

Phonology: How to Reconstruct a Dead Sound

Phonology, or the study of linguistic sounds, is one of the principal tools
of the historical linguist. Phonology is useful as a historical tool, because
the sounds people utter tend to change over time in certain directions and
not in others.

The direction of phonetic change is governed by two kinds of con-
straints: those that are generally applicable across most languages, and
those specific to a single language or a related group of languages. General
constraints are imposed by the mechanical limits of the human vocal
anatomy, the need to issue sounds that can be distinguished and under-
stood by listeners, and the tendency to simplify sound combinations that
are difficult to pronounce. Constraints within languages are imposed by
the limited range of sounds that are acceptable and meaningful for that
language. Often these language-specific sounds are very recognizable.
Comedians can make us laugh by speaking nonsense if they do it in the
characteristic phonology of French or Italian, for example. Armed with a
knowledge of both the general tendencies in the direction of phonetic
change and the specific phonetic conventions within a given language
group, a linguist can arrive at reliable conclusions about which phonetic
variants are early pronunciations and which come later. This is the first
step in reconstructing the phonological history of a language.

We know that French developed historically from the dialects of Latin
spoken in the Roman province of Gaul (modern France) during the wan-
ing centuries of the Roman Empire around 300-400 CE. As late as the
1500s vernacular French suffered from low prestige among scholars, as it
was considered nothing more than a corrupt form of Latin. Even if we
knew nothing about that history, we could examine the Latin centum (pro-
nounced [kentum]), and the French cent (pronounced [sohnt]), both mean-
ing “hundred,” and we could say that the sound of the Latin word makes
it the older form, that the Modern French form could have developed
from it according to known rules of sound change, and that an intermedi-
ate pronunciation, [tsohnt], probably existed before the modern form
appeared — and we would be right.

Some Basic Rules of Language Change: Phonology and Analogy

Two general phonetic rules help us make these decisions. One is that ini-
tial hard consonants like k and hard g tend to change toward soft sounds
like s and sh if they change at all, whereas a change from s to k would gen-
erally be unusual. Another is that a consonant pronounced as a stop in the
back of the mouth {£) is particularly likely to shift toward the front of the
mouth (/ or s) in a word where it is followed by a vowel that is pronounced
in the front of the mouth (e). Pronounce [ke-] and [se-], and note the posi-
tion of your tongue. The k is pronounced by using the back of the tongue
and both e and s are formed with the middle or the tip of the tongue,

Reconstructing a Dead Language 27

T

26 Chapter 2

which makes it easier to pronounce the segment se- than the segment he-.
Before a front vowel like -e we might expect the k- to shift forward to [ts-]
and then to [s-] but not the other way around.

This is an example of a general phonetic tendency called assimilation :
one sound tends to assimilate to a nearby sound in the same word, simpli-
fying the needed movements. The specific type of assimilation seen here is
called palatalization — a back consonant (k) followed by a front vowel (e)
was assimilated in French toward the front of the palate, changing the [k]
to [s]. Between the Latin [k] (pronounced with the back of the tongue at
the back of the palate) and the Modern French [s] (tip of the tongue at the
front of the palate) there should have been an intermediate pronunciation
ts (middle of the tongue at the middle of the palate). Such sequences per-
mit historical linguists to reconstruct undocumented intermediate stages
in the evolution of a language. Palatalization has been systematic in the
development of French from Latin. It is responsible for much of the dis-
tinctive phonology of the French language.

Assimilation usually changes the quality of a sound, or sometimes re-
moves sounds from words by slurring two sounds together. The opposite
process is the addition of new sounds to a word. A good example of an
innovation of this kind is provided by the variable pronunciations of the
word athlete in English. Many English speakers insert [-uh] in the middle
of the word, saying [ath-uh-lete], but most are not aware they are doing
so. The inserted syllable always is pronounced precisely the same way, as
[-uh], because it assimilates to the tongue position required to pronounce
the following -/. Linguists could have predicted that some speakers would
insert a vowel in a difficult cluster of consonants like -thl (a phenomenon
called epenthesis) and that the vowel inserted in athlete always would be
pronounced [-uh] because of the rule of assimilation.

Another kind of change is analogical change, which tends to affect gram-
mar quite directly. For example, the -s or -es ending for the plural of En-
glish nouns was originally limited to one class of Old English nouns: stan
for stone (nominative singular), stanas for stones (nominative plural). But
when a series of sound changes (see note 5 ) resulted in the loss of the pho-
nemes that had once distinguished nouns of different classes, the -s ending
began to be reinterpreted as a general plural indicator and was attached to
all nouns. Plurals formed with -n (oxen), with a zero change (sheep), and
with a vowel change in the stem (women) remain as relics of Old English,
but the shift to -s is driving out such “irregular” forms and has been doing
so for eight hundred years. Similar analogical changes have affected verbs:
help/helped has replaced Old English help/holp as the -ed ending has been

reinterpreted as a general ending for the past tense, reducing the once large
number of strong verbs that formed their past with a vowel change. Ana-
logical changes can also create new words or forms by analogy with old
ones. Words formed with -able and -scape exist in such great numbers in
English because these endings, which were originally bound to specific
words 0 measurable , landscape), were reinterpreted as suffixes that could be
removed and reattached to any stem ( touchable , moonscape).

Phonological and analogical change are the internal mechanisms
through which novel forms are incorporated into a language. By examin-
ing a sequence of documents within one language lineage from several
different points in the past — inscriptions in, say, classical Latin, late vul-
gar Latin, early Medieval French, later Medieval French, and modern
French — linguists have defined virtually all the sound changes and ana-
logical shifts in the evolution of French from Latin. Regular, systematic
rules, applicable also to other cases of language change in other languages,
explain most of these shifts. But how do linguists replay these shifts
backward to discover the origins of modern languages? How can we
reconstruct the sounds of a language like Proto-Indo-European, for which
there are no documents, a language spoken before writing was invented?

"Hundred": An Example of Phonetic Reconstruction

Proto-Indo-European words were not reconstructed to create a dictionary
of Proto-Indo-European vocabulary, although they are extraordinarily
useful in this way. The real aim in reconstruction is to prove that a list of
daughter terms are cognates, descended from the same mother term. The
reconstruction of the mother term is a by-product of the comparison, the
proof that every sound in every daughter word can be derived from a
sound in the common parent. The first step is to gather up the suspected
daughters: you must make a list of all the variants of the word you can find
in the Indo-European languages (table 2.1). You have to know the rules of
phonological change to do even this successfully, as some variants of the
word might have changed radically in sound. Just recognizing the candi-
dates and making up a good list can be a challenge. We will try this with
the Proto-Indo-European word for “hundred.” The Indo-European roots
for numbers, especially 1 to 10, 100, and 1,000, have been retained in
almost all the Indo-European daughters.

Our list includes Latin centum, Avestan satzm , Lithuanian simtas, and
Old Gothic hunda- (a root much like hunda- evolved into the English
word hundred). Similar-looking words meaning “hundred” in other

28 Chapter 2

Reconstructing a Dead Language 29

Table 2.1

Indo-European

Cognates for the Root

“Hundred”

Branch

Language

Term

Meaning

Celtic

Welsh

cant

hundred

Old Irish

cet

hundred

Italic

Latin

centum

hundred

Tocharian

TochA

kant

hundred

TochB

kante

hundred

Greek

Greek

emxov

hundred

Germanic

Old English

hund

hundred

OldHighGerm.

hunt

hundred

Gothic

hunda

100, 120

OldSaxon

hunderod

(long) hundred

Baltic

Lithuanian

simtas

hundred

Latvian

simts

hundred

Slavic

OldChurchSlav.

suto

hundred

Bulgarian

sto

hundred

Anatolian

Lycian

snta

unit of 10 or 100

Indo-Iranian

Avestan

satsm

hundred

Oldlndic

s'atam

hundred

Indo-European languages should be added, and 1 have already referred to
the French word cent , but I will use only four for simplicity’s sake. The lour
words I have chosen come from four Indo-European branches: Italic,
Indo-Iranian, Baltic, and Germanic.

The question we must answer is this: Are these words phonetically
transformed daughters of a single parent word? If the answer is yes, they
are cognates. To prove they are cognates, we must be able to reconstruct
an ancestral sequence of phonemes that could have developed into all the
documented daughter sounds through known rules. We start with the
first sound in the word.

The initial [k] phoneme in Latin centum could be explained if the parent
term began with a [k] sound as well. The initial soft consonants ([s] [sh])

in Avestan satrn and Lithuanian simtas could have developed from a
Proto-Indo-European word that began with a hard consonant [k], like
Latin centum , since hard sounds generally tend to shift toward soft sounds
if they change at all. The reverse development ([s] or [sh] to [k]) would be
very unlikely. Also, palatalization and sibilation (shifting to a s’ or ‘sh’
sound) of initial hard consonants is expected in both the Indie branch, of
which Vedic Sanskrit is a member; and the Baltic branch, of which Lithu-
anian is a member. The general direction of sound change and the specific
conventions in each branch permit us to say that the Proto-Indo-European
word from which ail three of these developed could have begun with ‘k’.

What about hunda ? It looks quite different but, in fact, the h is expected —
it follows a rule that affected all initial [k] sounds in the Germanic branch.
This shift involved not just k but also eight other consonants in Pre-
Germanic. 6 The consonant shift spread throughout the prehistoric Pre-
Germanic language community, giving rise to a new Proto-Germanic
phonology that would be retained in all the later Germanic languages, in-
cluding, ultimately, English. This consonant shift was described by and
named after Jakob Grimm (the same Grimm who collected fairy tales) and
so is called Grimm’s Law. One of the changes described in Grimm’s Law
was that the archaic Indo-European sound [k] shifted in most phonetic
environments to Germanic [h]. The Indo-European k preserved in Latin
centum shifted to h in Old Gothic hunda-\ the initial k seen in Latin caput
‘head’ shifted to h in Old English hafud ‘head’; and so on throughout the
vocabulary. (C aput> hafud shows that p also changed to f as in pater>fater).
So, although it looks very different, hunda- conforms: its first consonant
can be derived from k by Grimm’s Law.

The first sound in the Proto-Indo-European word for “hundred” prob-
ably was k. (An initial [k] sound satisfies the other Indo-European cog-
nates for “hundred” as well.)' The second sound should have been a vowel,
but which vowel?

The second sound was a vowel that does not exist in English. In Proto-
Indo-European resonants could act as vowels, similar to the resonant n in
the colloquial pronunciation of fish'ri (as in Bob's gone fish'ri). The second
sound was a resonant, either *m or *n , both of which occur among the
daughter terms being compared. (An asterisk is used before a recon-
structed form for which there is no direct evidence.) M is attested in the
Lithuanian cognate simtas. An m in the Proto-Indo-European parent
could account for the m in Lithuanian. It could have changed to n in Old
Indie, Germanic, and other lineages by assimilating to the following t or
d y as both n and t are articulated on the teeth. (Old Spanish semda ‘path’

jo Chapter 2

changed to modern Spanish senda for the same reason.) A shift from an
original m to an n before a t is explicable, but a shift from an original n to
an m is much less likely. Therefore, the original second sound probably was
rn. This consonant could have been lost entirely in Sanskrit satam by yet
another assimilative tendency called total assimilation: after the m changed
to n, giving *santam, the n was completely assimilated to the following /,
giving satam. The same process was responsible for the loss of the [k]
sound in the shift from Latin octo to modern Italian otto ‘eight’.

I will stop here, with an ancestral *k'm -, in my discussion of the Proto-
Indo-European ancestor of centum. The analysis should continue through
the phonemes that are attested in all the surviving cognates to reconstruct
an acceptable ancestral root. By applying such rules to all the cognates,
linguists have been able to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European sequence
of phonemes, *k’mtom, that could have developed into all the attested pho-
nemes in all the attested daughter forms. The Proto-Indo-European root
*k’mtom is the residue of a successful comparison — it is the proof that the
daughter terms being compared are indeed cognates. It is also likely to be
a pretty good approximation of the way this word was pronounced in at
least some dialects of Proto-Indo-European.

The Limitations and Strengths of Reconstruction

The comparative method will produce the sound of the ancestral root and
confirm a genetic relationship only with a group of cognates that has evolved
regularly according to the rules of sound change. The result of a compara-
tive analysis is either a demonstration of a genetic connection, if every
phoneme in every cognate can be derived from a mutually acceptable pa-
rental phoneme; or no demonstrable connection. In many cases sounds may
have been borrowed into a language from a neighboring language, and
those sounds might replace the predicted shifts. The comparative method
cannot force a regular reconstruction on an irregular set of sounds. Much
of the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary, perhaps most of it, never will be
reconstructed. Regular groups of cognates permit us to reconstruct a Proto-
Indo-European root for the word door but not for wall ; for rain but not for
river, (or foot but not for leg. Proto-Indo-European certainly had words for
these things, but we cannot safely reconstruct how they sounded.

The comparative method cannot prove that two words are not related,
but it can fail to produce proof that they are. For example, the Greek god
Ouranos and the Indie deity Varuna had strikingly similar mythological
attributes, and their names sound somewhat alike. Could Ouranos and

Reconstructing a Dead Language ji

Varuna be reflexes of the name of some earlier Proto-Indo-European god?
Possibly — but the two names cannot be derived from a common parent by
the rules of sound change known to have operated in Greek and Old
Indie. Similarly Latin deus (god) and Greek theos (god) look like obvious
cognates, but the comparative method reveals that Latin deus , in fact,
shares a common origin with Greek Zeus? If Greek theos were to have a
Latin cognate it should begin with an [(] sound ( festus ‘festive’ has been
suggested, but some of the other sounds in this comparison are problem-
atic). It is still possible that deus and theos were historically related in some
irregular way, but we cannot prove it.

In the end, how can we be sure that the comparative method accurately
reconstructs undocumented stages in the phonological history of a lan-
guage? Linguists themselves are divided on the question of the “reality” of
reconstructed terms . 9 A reconstruction based on cognates from eight Indo-
European branches, like *k'mtom-, is much more reliable and probably
more “true” than one based on cognates in just two branches. Cognates in
at least three branches, including an ancient branch (Anatolian, Greek,
Avestan Iranian, Old Indie, Latin, some aspects of Celtic) should produce
a reliable reconstruction. But how reliable? One test was conceived by Rob-
ert A. Hall, who reconstructed the shared parent of the Romance lan-
guages using just the rules of sound change, and then compared his
reconstruction to Latin. Making allowances for the fact that the actual
parents of the Romance languages were several provincial Vulgar Latin
dialects, and the Latin used for the test was the classical Latin of Cicero
and Caesar, the result was reassuring. Hall was even able to reconstruct a
contrast between two sets of vowels although none of the modern daugh-
ters had retained it. He was unable to identify the feature that distinguished
the two vowel sets as length — Latin had long vowels and short vowels, a
distinction lost in all its Romance daughters — but he was able to rebuild a
system with two contrasting sets of vowels and many of the other, more
obvious aspects of Latin morphology, syntax, and vocabulary. Such clever
exercises aside, the best proof of the realism of reconstruction lies in several
cases where linguists have suggested a reconstruction and archaeologists
have subsequently found inscriptions that proved it correct . 10

For example, the oldest recorded Germanic cognates for the word guest
(Gothic gasts, Old Norse gestr y Old High German gast) are thought to be
derived from a reconstructed late Proto-Indo-European *ghos-ti- (which
probably meant both “host” and “guest” and thus referred to a relation-
ship of hospitality between strangers rather than to one of its roles)
through a Proto-Germanic form reconstructed as *gastiz. None of the

j2 Chapter 2

Reconstructing a Dead Language jj

known forms of the word in the later Germanic languages contained the
i before the final consonant, but rules of sound change predicted that the
i should theoretically have been there in Proto-Germanic. Then an ar-
chaic Germanic inscription was found on a gold horn dug from a grave in
Denmark. The inscription ek hlewagastiz ho/itijaz (or holtingaz ) horna ta-
wido is translated “I, Hlewagasti of Holt (or Holting) made the horn.” It
contained the personal name Hlewagastiz, made up of two stems, Hlewa-
‘fame’ and gastiz ‘guest’. Linguists were excited not because the horn was
a beautiful golden artifact but because the stem contained the predicted i,
verifying the accuracy of both the reconstructed Proto-Germanic form
and its late Proto-Indo-European ancestor. Linguistic reconstruction had
passed a real-world test.

Similarly linguists working on the development of the Greek language
had proposed a Proto-Indo-European labiovelar *k w (pronounced [kw-])
as the ancestral phoneme that developed into Greek / (before a front
vowel) or p (before a back vowel). The reconstruction of was a reason-
able but complex solution for the problem of how the Classical Greek
consonants were related to their Proto-Indo-European ancestors. It re-
mained entirely theoretical until the discovery and decipherment of the
Mycenaean Linear B tablets, which revealed that the earliest form of
Greek, Mycenaean, had the predicted k u ' where later Greek had t or p be-
fore front and back vowels. 11 Examples like these confirm that the recon-
structions of historical linguistics are more than just abstractions.

A reconstructed term is, of course, a phonetic idealization. Recon-
structed Proto-Indo-European cannot capture the variety of dialectical
pronunciations that must have existed more than perhaps one thousand
years when the language was living in the mouths ot people. Nevertheless,
it is a remarkable victory that we can now pronounce, however stiffly,
thousands of words in a language spoken by nonliterate people before
2500 BCE.

The Lexicon: How to Reconstruct Dead Meanings

Once we have reconstructed the sound of a word in Proto-Indo-European,
how do we know what it meant ? Some archaeologists have doubted the
reliability of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, as they felt that the
original meanings of reconstructed terms could never be known confi-
dently. 12 But we can assign reliable meanings to many reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European terms. And it is in the meanings of their words that
we find the best evidence for the material culture, ecological environment,

social relations, and spiritual beliefs of the speakers of Proto-Indo-
European. Every meaning is worth the struggle.

Three general rules guide the assignment of meaning. First, look for the
most ancient meanings that can be found. If the goal is to retrieve the
meaning of the original Proto-Indo-European word, modern meanings
should be checked against meanings that are recorded for ancient cognates.

Second, if one meaning is consistently attached to a cognate in all lan-
guage branches, like hundred in the example I have used, that is clearly the
least problematic meaning we can assign to the original Proto-Indo-
European root. It is difficult to imagine how that meaning could have
become attached to all the cognates unless it were the meaning attached to
the ancestral root.

Third, if the word can be broken down into roots that point to the same
meaning as the one proposed, then that meaning is doubly likely. For ex-
ample, Proto-Indo-European *k , mtom probably was a shortened version of
*dek'mtom y a word that included the Proto-Indo-European root *dek’m ‘ten’.
The sequence of sounds in *dek'm was reconstructed independently using
the cognates for the word ten y so the fact that the reconstructed roots for
ten and hundred are linked in both meaning and sound tends to verify the
reliability of both reconstructions. The root *k'mtom turns out to be not
just an arbitrary string of Proto-Indo-European phonemes but a meaning-
ful compound: “(a unit) of tens.” This also tells us that the speakers of
Proto-Indo-European had a decimal numbering system and counted to
one hundred by tens, as we do.

In most cases the meaning of a Proto-Indo-European word changed
and drifted as the various speech communities using it became separated,
centuries passed, and daughter languages evolved. Because the association
between word and meaning is arbitrary, there is less regular directionality
to change in meaning than there is in sound change (although some se-
mantic shifts are more probable than others). Nevertheless, general mean-
ings can be retrieved. A good example is the word for “wheel.”

“Wheel”: An Example of Semantic Reconstruction

The word wheel is the modern English descendant of a PIE root that had
a sound like *k w ek u 'los or *k w ek w l6s . But what, exactly, did *k w ek w l< os mean in
Proto-Indo-European? The sequence of phonemes in the root *k u ek w los
was pieced together by comparing cognates from eight old Indo-European
languages, representing five branches. Reflexes of this word survived in
Old Indie and Avestan (from the Indo-Iranian branch), Old Norse and

j4 Chapter 2

Reconstructing a Dead Language jj

Old English (from the Germanic branch), Greek, Phrygian, and Tochar-
ian A and B. The meaning “wheel” is attested for the cognates in Sanskrit,
Avestan, Old Norse, and Old English. The meaning of the Greek cognate
had shifted to “circle” in the singular but in the plural still meant “wheels.”
In Tocharian and Phrygian the cognates meant “wagon” or “vehicle.”
What was the original meaning? (table 2.2).

Five of the eight *k w e'k w los cognates have “wheel” or “wheels” as an at-
tested meaning, and in those languages (Phrygian, Greek, Tocharian A 8c
B) where the meaning drifted away from “wheel(s),” it had not drifted far
(“circle,” “wagon,” or “vehicle”). Moreover, the cognates that preserve the
meaning “wheel” are found in languages that are geographically isolated
from one another (Old Indie and Avestan in Iran were neighbors, but nei-
ther had any known contact with Old Norse or Old English). The mean-
ing “wheel” is unlikely to have been borrowed into Old Norse from Old
Indie, or vice versa.

Some shifts in meaning are unlikely, and others are common. It is com-
mon to name a whole (“vehicle,” “wagon”) after one of its most character-
istic parts (“wheels”), as seems to have happened in Phrygian and
Tocharian. We do the same in modern English slang when we speak of
someone’s car as their “wheels,” or clothing as their “threads.” A shift in
meaning in the other direction, using a word that originally referred to the
whole to refer to one of its parts (using wagon to refer to wheel ), is much
less probable.

The meaning of wheel is given additional support by the fact that it has
an Indo-European etymology, like the root for * k'mtom . It was a word cre-
ated from another Indo-European root. That root was *k w e/- y a verb that
meant “to turn.” So 'k^ek^los is not just a random string of phonemes re-
constructed from the cognates for wheel, it meant “the thing that turns.”
This not only tends to confirm the meaning “wheel” rather than “circle” or
“vehicle” but it also indicates that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European
made up their own words for wheels. If they learned about the invention
of the wheel from others they did not adopt the foreign name for it, so the
social setting in which the transfer took place probably was brief, between
people who remained socially distant. The alternative, that wheels were
invented within the Proto-Indo-European language community, seems
unlikely for archaeological and historical reasons, though it remains pos-
sible (see chapter 4).

One more rule helps to confirm the reconstructed meaning. If it fits
within a semantic field consisting of other roots with closely related recon-
structed meanings, we can at least be relatively confident that such a word

Table 2.2

Proto-Indo-European Roots for Words Referring to Parts of a Wagon

PIE Root Word

Wagon Part

Daughter Languages

*k w ek'Tos

(wheel)

Old Norse hvel ‘wheel’; Old English hweohl ‘wheel’;
Middle Dutch wiel ‘wheel’; Avestan Iranian caxtra-
‘wheel’; Old Indie cakra ‘wheel, Sun disc’; Greek kuklos
‘circle’ and kukla (plural) ‘wheels’; Tocharian A kukal
‘wagon’; Tocharian B kokale ‘wagon’

*rot-eh 2 -

(wheel)

Old Irish roth ‘wheel’; Welsh rhod ‘wheel’; Latin rota
wheel’; Old High German rad ‘wheel’; Lithuanian ratas
‘wheel’; Latvian rats ‘wheel’ and rati (plural) ‘wagon’;
Albanian rreth ‘ring, hoop, carriage tire’; Avestan
Iranian ratha ‘chariot, wagon’; Old Indie ratha ‘chariot,
wagon’

*ak*s-, or

(axle)

Latin axis ‘axle, axis’; Old English eax ‘axle’; Old High
German *h a ek*s- ahsa ‘axle’; Old Prussian assis ‘axle’;
Lithuanian asfs ‘axle’; Old Church Slavonic osi ‘axle’;
Mycenaean Greek a-ko-so-ne ‘axle’; Old Indie aks*a
‘axle’

*ei-/*oi-, or

(thill)

Old English ar- ‘oar’; Russia ?i voje ‘shaft’; Slovenian oje
‘shaft’; Hittite h 2 ih 3 s or hissa- ‘pole, harnessing shaft’;
Greek oisioi* ‘tiller, rudderpost’; Avestan Iranian aesa
‘pair of shafts, plow-pole’; Old Indie is*a pole, shaft’

*wegheti-

(ride)

Welsh amwain ‘drive about’; Latin veho‘bear, convey’;
Old Norse vega ‘bring, move’; Old High German wegan
‘move, weigh’; Lithuanian vezu ‘drive’; Old Church
Slavonic vezo ‘drive’; Avestan Iranian vazaiti ‘trans-
ports, leads’; Old Indie vahati ‘transports, carries,
conveys’. Derivative nouns have the meaning “wagon”
in Greek, Old Irish , Welsh , Old High German, and Old
Norse.

Reconstructing a Dead Language jy

j6 Chapter 2

could have existed in Proto-Indo-European. “Wheel” is part of a semantic
field consisting of words for the parts of a wagon or cart (table 2.2). Happily,
at least four other such words can be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-
European. These are:

1. *rot-eh 2 - , a second term for “wheel,” with cognates in Old Indie
and Avestan that meant “chariot,” and cognates that meant “wheel”
in Latin, Old Irish, Welsh, Old High German, and Lithuanian.

2. *aks- (or perhaps *h 2 eks-) axle’ attested by cognates that had not
varied in meaning over thousands of years, and still meant “axle”
in Old Indie, Greek, Latin, Old Norse, Old English, Old High
German, Lithuanian, and Old Church Slavonic.

3. *h 2 ih^s- ‘thill’ (the harness pole) attested by cognates that meant
“thill” in Hittite and Old Indie.

4. *wegheti, a verb meaning “to convey or go in a vehicle,” attested by
cognates carrying this meaning in Old Indie, Avestan, Latin, Old
English, and Old Church Slavonic and by cognate-derived nouns
ending in *-no- meaning “wagon” in Old Irish, Old English, Old
High German, and Old Norse.

These four additional terms constitute a well-documented semantic field
(wheel, axle , thill, and wagon or convey in a vehicle) that increases our con-
fidence in reconstructing the meaning “wheel” for *k u 'e'k w los. Of the five
terms assigned to this semantic field, all but thill have clear Indo-European
etymologies in independently reconstructed roots. The speakers of Proto-
Indo-European were familiar with wheels and wagons, and used words of
their own creation to talk about them.

Fine distinctions, shades of meaning, and the word associations that
enriched Proto-Indo-European poetry may be forever lost, but gross
meanings are recoverable for at least fifteen hundred Proto-Indo-European
roots such as *dekm- ‘ten’, and for additional thousands of other words de-
rived from them, such as *krritom- ‘hundred’. Those meanings provide a
window into the lives and thoughts of the speakers of Proto-Indo-
European.

Syntax and Morphology: The Shape of a Dead Language

I will not try to describe in any detail the grammatical connections be-
tween the Indo-European languages. The reconstructed vocabulary is
most important for our purposes. But grammar, the bedrock of language

classification, provides the primary evidence for classifying languages and
determining relationships between them. Grammar has two aspects: syn-
tax , or the rules governing the order of words in sentences; and morphol-
ogy, or the rules governing the forms words must take when used in
particular ways.

Proto-Indo-European grammar has left its mark on all the Indo-
European languages to one degree or another. In all the Indo-European
language branches, nouns are declined; that is, the noun changes form
depending on how it is used in a sentence. English lost most of these dec-
linations during its evolution from Anglo-Saxon, but all the other lan-
guages in the Germanic branch retain them, and we have kept some
use-dependent pronouns (masculine: he, his, him I feminine: she, hers, her).
Moreover, most Indo-European nouns are declined in similar ways, with
endings that are genetically cognate, and with the same formal system of
cases (nominative, genitive, accusative, etc.) that intersect in the same way
with the same three gender classes (masculine, feminine, neuter); and
with similar formal classes, or declensions, of nouns that are declined in
distinctive ways. Indo-European verbs also share similar conjugation classes
(first person, second person or familiar, third person or formal, singular,
plural, past tense, present tense, etc.), similar stem alterations (run-ran,
give-gave), and similar endings. This particular constellation of formal
categories, structures, transformations, and endings is not at all necessary
or universal in human language. It is unique, as a system, and is found
only in the Indo-European languages. The languages that share this gram-
matical system certainly are daughters of a single language from which
that system was inherited.

One example shows how unlikely it would be for the Indo-European
languages to share these grammatical structures by random chance. The
verb to be has one form in the first-person singular ([I] am) and another in
the third-person singular ([he/she/it] is). Our English verbs are descended
from the archaic Germanic forms im and ist. The Germanic forms have
exact, proven cognates in Old Indie as mi and dstr, in Greek eimt and estv,
and in Old Church Slavonic jesmi and jestu. All these words are derived
from a reconstructable Proto-Indo-European pair, *hfsmi and * hfsti . That
all these languages share the same system of verb classes (first person,
second person or familiar, and third person), and that they use the same
basic roots and endings to identify those classes, confirms that they are
genetically related languages.

j8 Chapter 2

Conclusion: Raising a Language from the Dead

It will always be difficult to work with Proto-Indo-European. The version
we have is uncertain in many morphological details, phonetically ideal-
ized, and fragmentary, and can be difficult to decipher. The meanings of
some terms will never be fully understood, and tor others only an approxi-
mate definition is possible. Yet reconstructed Proto-Indo-European cap-
tures key parts of a language that actually existed.

Some dismiss reconstructed Proto-Indo-European as nothing more
than a hypothesis. But the limitations of Proto-Indo-European apply
equally to the written languages of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia,
which are universally counted among the great treasures of antiquity. No
curator of Assyrian records would suggest that we should discard the pal-
ace archives of Nineveh because they are incomplete, or because we cannot
know the exact sound and meaning of many terms, or because we are un-
certain about how the written court language related to the ‘real’ language
spoken by the people in the street. Yet these same problems have con-
vinced many archaeologists that the study of Proto-Indo-European is too
speculative to yield any real historical value.

Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is a long, fragmentary list of words
used in daily speech by people who created no other texts. That is why it is
important. The list becomes useful, however, only if we can determine
where it came from. To do that we must locate the Proto-Indo-European
homeland. But we cannot locate the Proto-Indo-European homeland un-
til we first locate Proto-Indo-European in time. We have to know when it
was spoken. Then it becomes possible to say where.

Chapter Three

Language and Time 1
The Last Speakers of Proto-Indo-European

Time changes everything. Reading to my young children, I found that
in mid-sentence I began to edit and replace words that suddenly looked
archaic to me, in stories I had loved when I was young. The language of
Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne now seems surprisingly stiff and
distant, and as for Shakespeare’s English — we all need the glossary. What
is true for modern languages was true for prehistoric languages. Over
time, they changed. So what do we mean by Proto-Indo-European? If it
changed over time, is it not a moving target? However we define it, for
how long was Proto-Indo-European spoken? Most important, when was it
spoken? How do we assign a date to a language that left no inscriptions,
that died without ever being written down? It helps to divide any problem
into parts, and this one can easily be divided into two: the birth date and
the death date.

This chapter concentrates on the death date, the date after which Proto-
Indo-European must have ceased to exist. But it helps to begin by consid-
ering how long a period probably preceded that. Given that the time
between the birth and death dates of Proto-Indo-European could not
have been infinite, precisely how long a time was it? Do languages, which
are living, changing things, have life expectancies?

The Size of the Chronological Window:

How Long Do Languages Last?

If we were magically able to converse with an English speaker living a
thousand years ago, as proposed in the last chapter, we would not under-
stand each other. Very few natural languages, those that are learned and
spoken at home, remain sufficiently unchanged after a thousand years to be
considered the “same language.” How can the rate of change be measured?

40 Chapter j

Languages normally have dialects — regional accents — and, within any
region, they have innovating social sectors (entertainers, soldiers, trad-
ers) and conservative sectors (the very rich, the very poor). Depending
on who you are, your language might be changing very rapidly or very
slowly. Unstable conditions — invasions, famines, the fall of old prestige
groups and the rise of new ones — increase the rate of change. Some
parts of language change earlier and faster, whereas other parts are resis-
tant. That last observation led the linguist Morris Swadesh to develop a
standard word list chosen from the most resistant vocabulary, a group of
words that tend to be retained, not replaced, in most languages around
the world, even after invasions and conquests. Over the long term, he
hoped, the average rate of replacement in this resistant vocabulary might
yield a reliable standardized measurement of the speed of language
change, what Swadesh called glottochronology}

Between 1950 and 1952 Swadesh published a hundred-word and a
two-hundred-word basic core vocabulary , a standardized list of resistant
terms. All languages, he suggested, tend to retain their own words for
certain kinds of meanings, including body parts (blood, foot); lower
numerals (one, two, three); some kinship terms (mother, father); basic
needs (eat, sleep); basic natural features (sun, moon, rain, river); some
flora and fauna (tree, domesticated animals); some pronouns (this, that,
he, she); and conjunctions (and, or, if). The content of the list can be and
has been modified to suit vocabularies in different languages — in fact,
the preferred two-hundred-meaning list in English contains 215 words.
The English core vocabulary has proven extremely resistant to change.
Although English has borrowed more than 50% of its general vocabulary
from the Romance languages, mainly from French (reflecting the con-
quest of Anglo-Saxon England by the French-speaking Normans) and
Latin (from centuries of technical and professional vocabulary training
in courts, churches, and schools), only 4% of the English core vocabulary
is borrowed from Romance. In its core vocabulary English remains a
Germanic language, true to its origins among the Anglo-Saxons who
migrated from northern Europe to Britain after the fall of the Roman
Empire.

Comparing core vocabularies between old and new phases in languages
with long historical records (Old English/Modern English, Middle
Egyptian/Coptic, Ancient Chinese/Modern Mandarin, Late Latin/
Modern French, and nine other pairs), Swadesh calculated an average
replacement rate of 14% per thousand years for the hundred-word list,
and 19% per thousand years for the two-hundred-word list. He suggested

Last Speakers of Proto-Indo-European 41

that 19% was an acceptable average for all languages (usually rounded to
20%). To illustrate what that number means, Italian and French have
distinct, unrelated words for 23% of the terms in the two-hundred-word
list, and Spanish and Portuguese show a difference of 15%. As a general
rule, if more than 10% of the core vocabulary is different between two
dialects, they are either mutually unintelligible or approaching that state,
that is, they are distinct languages or emerging languages. On average,
then, with a replacement rate of 14-19% per thousand years in the core
vocabulary, we should expect that most languages — including this one —
would be incomprehensible to our own descendants a thousand years
from now.

Swadesh hoped to use the replacement rate in the core vocabulary as a
standardized clock to establish the date of splits and branches in unwrit-
ten languages. His own research involved the splits between American
Indian language families in prehistoric North America, which were un-
datable by any other means. But the reliability of his standard replacement
rate wilted under criticism. Extreme cases like Icelandic (very slow change,
with a replacement rate of only 3-4% per thousand years) and English
(very rapid, with a 26% replacement rate per thousand years) challenged
the utility of the “average” rate. 2 The mathematics was affected if a lan-
guage had multiple words for one meaning on the list. The dates given by
glottochronology for many language splits contradicted known historical
dates, generally by giving a date much later than it should have been. This
direction in the errors suggested that real language change often was
slower than Swadesh’s model suggested — less than 19% per thousand
years. A devastating critique of Swadesh s mathematics by Chretien, in
1962, seemed to drive a stake through the heart of glottochronology.

But in 1972 Chretiens critique was itself shown to be incorrect, and,
since the 1980s, Sankoff and Embleton have introduced equations that
include as critical values borrowing rates, the number of geographic bor-
ders with other languages, and a similarity index between the compared
languages (because similar languages borrow in the core more easily then
dissimilar languages). Multiple synonyms can each be given a fractional
score. Studies incorporating these improved methods succeeded better in
producing dates for splits between known languages that matched histori-
cal facts. More important, comparisons between most Indo-European
languages still yielded replacement rates in the core vocabulary of about
10-20% per thousand years. Comparing the core vocabularies in ninety-
five Indo-European languages, Kruskal and Black found that the most
frequent date for the first splitting of Proto-Indo-European was about

42 Chapter j

Last Speakers of Proto-Indo-European 43

3000 BCE. Although this estimate cannot be relied on absolutely, it is
probably “in the ballpark” and should not be ignored. 3

One simple point can be extracted from these debates: if the Proto-Indo-
European core vocabulary changed at a rate >10% per millennium, or at
the lower end of the expected range, Proto-Indo-European did not exist as
a single language with a single grammar and vocabulary for as long as a
thousand years. Proto-Indo-European grammar and vocabulary should
have changed quite substantially over a thousand years. Yet the grammar of
Proto-Indo-European, as reconstructed by linguists, is remarkably homo-
geneous both in morphology and phonology. Proto-Indo-European nouns
and pronouns shared a set of cases, genders, and declensions that intersect
with dozens of cognate phonological endings. Verbs had a shared system of
tenses and aspects, again tagged by a shared set of phonological vowel
changes (run-ran) and endings. This shared system of grammatical struc-
tures and phonological ways of labeling them looks like a single language.
It suggests that reconstructed Proto-Indo-European probably refers to less
than a thousand years of language change. It took less than a thousand
years for late Vulgar Latin to evolve into seven Romance languages, and
Proto-Indo-European does not contain nearly enough internal grammati-
cal diversity to represent seven distinct grammars.

But considering that Proto-Indo-European is a fragmentary reconstruc-
tion, not an actual language, we should allow it more time to account for the
gaps in our knowledge (more on this in chapter 5). Let us assign a nominal
lifetime of two thousand years to the phase of language history represented
by reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. In the history of English two thou-
sand years would take us all the way back to the origins of the sound shifts
that defined Proto-Germanic, and would include all the variation in all the
Germanic languages ever spoken, from Hlewagasti of Holt to Puff Daddy
of hip-hop fame. Proto-Indo-European does not seem to contain that much
variation, so two thousand years probably is too long. But for archaeological
purposes it is quite helpful to be able to say that the time period we are try-
ing to identify is no longer than two thousand years.

What is the end date for that two-thousand-year window of time?

The Terminal Date for Proto-Indo-European:

The Mother Becomes Her Daughters

The terminal date for reconstructed Proto-Indo-European — the date after
which it becomes an anachronism — should be close to the date when its
oldest daughters were born. Proto-Indo-European was reconstructed on

the basis of systematic comparisons between all the Indo-European
daughter languages. Tie mother tongue cannot be placed later than the
daughters. Of course, it would have survived after the detachment and
isolation of the oldest daughter, but as time passed, if that daughter dialect
remained isolated from the Proto-Indo-European speech community,
each would have developed its own peculiar innovations. The image of the
mother that is retained through each of the daughters is the form the
mother had before the detachment of that daughter branch. Each daughter,
therefore, preserves a somewhat different image of the mother.

Linguists have exploited this fact and other aspects of internal variation
to identify chronological phases within Proto-Indo-European. The num-
ber of phases defined by different linguists varies from three (early, middle,
late) to six. 4 But if we define Proto-Indo-European as the language that
was ancestral to all the Indo-European daughters, then it is the oldest re-
constructable form, the earliest phase of Proto-Indo-European, that we are
talking about. The later daughters did not evolve directly from this early
kind of Proto-Indo-European but from some intermediate, evolved set of
late Indo-European languages that preserved aspects of the mother tongue
and passed them along.

So when did the oldest daughter separate? The answer to that question
depends very much on the accidental survival of written inscriptions. And
the oldest daughter preserved in written inscriptions is so peculiar that it is
probably safer to rely on the image of the mother preserved within the
second set of daughters. What’s wrong with the oldest daughter?

The Oldest and Strangest Daughter (or Cousin?): Anatolian

The oldest written Indo-European languages belonged to the Anatolian
branch. The Anatolian branch had three early stems: Hittite, Luwian, and
Palaic." All three languages are extinct but once were spoken over large
parts of ancient Anatolia, modern Turkey (figure 3.1). Hittite is by far the
best known of the three, as it was the palace and administrative language
of the Hittite Empire.

Inscriptions place Hittite speakers in Anatolia as early as 1900 BCE,
but the empire was created only about 1650-1600 BCE, when Hittite
warlords conquered and united several independent native Hattie king-
doms in central Anatolia around modern Kayseri. The name Hittite was
given to them by Egyptian and Syrian scribes who failed to distinguish
the Hittite kings from the Hattie kings they had conquered. The Hittites
called themselves Neshites after the Anatolian city, Kanesh, where they

44 Chapter^

Last Speakers of Proto-Indo-European 45

Figure 3.1 The ancient languages of Anatolia at about 1500 BCE.

rose to power. But Kanesh had earlier been a Hattie city; its name was
Hattie. Hattic-speakers also named the city that became the capital of the
Hittite Empire, Hattusas. Hattie was a non-Indo-European language,
probably linked distantly to the Caucasian languages. The Hittites bor-
rowed Hattie words for throne, lord, king, queen, queen mother, heir ap-
parent, priest, and a long list of palace officials and cult leaders — probably
in a historical setting where the Hattie languages were the languages of
royalty. Palaic, the second Anatolian language, also borrowed vocabulary
from Hattie. Palaic was spoken in a city called Pala probably located in
north-central Anatolia north of Ankara. Given the geography of Hattie
place-names and Hatties Palaic/Hittite loans, Hattie seems to have been
spoken across all of central Anatolia before Hittite or Palaic was spoken
there. The early speakers of Hittite and Palaic were intruders in a non-
Indo-European central Anatolian landscape dominated by Hattie speak-
ers who had already founded cities, acquired literate bureaucracies, and
established kingdoms and palace cults. 6

After Hittite speakers usurped the Hattie kingdom they enjoyed a pe-
riod of prosperity enriched by Assyrian trade, and then endured defeats
that later were dimly but bitterly recalled. They remained confined to the
center of the Anatolian plateau until about 1650 BCE, when Hittite
armies became mighty enough to challenge the great powers of the Near
East and the imperial era began. The Hittites looted Babylon, took other
cities from the Assyrians, and fought the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II to
a standstill at the greatest chariot battle of ancient times, at Kadesh, on

the banks of the Orontes River in Syria, in 1286 BCE. A Hittite monarch
married an Egyptian princess. The Hittite kings also knew and negotiated
with the princes who ruled Troy, probably the place referred to in the Hit-
tite archives as steep Wilusa ( Ilios The Hittite capital city, Hattusas, was
burned in a general calamity that brought down the Hittite kings, their
army, and their cities about 1180 BCE. The Hittite language then quickly
disappeared; apparently only the ruling elite ever spoke it.

The third early Anatolian language, Luwian, was spoken by more peo-
ple over a larger area, and it continued to be spoken after the end of the
empire. During the later Hittite empire Luwian was the dominant spoken
language even in the Hittite royal court. Luwian did not borrow from
Hattie and so might have been spoken originally in western Anatolia,
outside the Hattie core region — perhaps even in Troy, where a Luwian
inscription was found on a seal in Troy level VI — the Troy of the Trojan
War. On the other hand, Luwian did borrow from other, unknown non-
Indo-European language(s). Hittite and Luwian texts are abundant from
the empire period, 1650-1180 BCE. These are the earliest complete texts
in any Indo-European language. But individual Hittite and Luwian words
survive from an earlier era, before the empire began. 8

The oldest Hittite and Luwian names and words appeared in the business
records of Assyrian merchants who lived in a commercial district, or karum,
outside the walls of Kanesh, the city celebrated by the later Hittites as the
place where they first became kings. Archaeological excavations here, on the
banks of the Halys River in central Anatolia, have shown that the Assyrian
karum , a foreigners’ enclave that covered more than eighty acres outside the
Kanesh city walls, operated from about 1920 to 1850 BCE (level II), was
burned, rebuilt, and operated again (level lb) until about 1750 BCE, when it
was burned again. After that the Assyrians abandoned the karum system in
Anatolia, so the Kanesh karum is a closed archaeological deposit dated be-
tween 1920 and 1750 BCE. The Kanesh karum was the central office for a
network of literate Assyrian merchants who oversaw trade between the As-
syrian state and the warring kingdoms of Late Bronze Age Anatolia. The
Assyrian decision to make Kanesh their distribution center greatly increased
the power of its Hittite and Luwian occupants.

Most of the local names recorded by the merchants in the Kanesh
karum accounts were Hittite or Luwian, beginning with the earliest rec-
ords of about 1900 BCE. Many still were Hattie. But Hittite speakers
seem to have controlled business with the Assyrian karum. The Assyrian
merchants were so accustomed to doing business with Hittite speakers
that they adopted Hittite words for contract and lodging even in their

46 Chapter j

private correspondence. Palaic, the third language of the Anatolian
branch, is not known from the Kanesh records. Palaic died out as a spoken
language probably before 1500 BCE. It presumably was spoken in Anato-
lia during the karum period but not at Kanesh.

Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic had evolved already by 1900 BCE. This is a
critical piece of information in any attempt to date Proto-Indo-European.
All three were descended from the same root language, Proto-Anatolian.
The linguist Craig Melchert described Luwian and Hittite of the empire
period, ca. 1400 BCE, as sisters about as different as twentieth-century
Welsh and Irish. 9 Welsh and Irish probably share a common origin of
about two thousand years ago. If Luwian and Hittite separated from
Proto-Anatolian two thousand years before 1400 BCE, then Proto-
Anatolian should be placed at about 3400 BCE. What about its ancestor?
When did the root of the Anatolian branch separate from the rest of
Proto-Indo-European?

Dating Proto- Anatolian: The Definition of Proto- and Pre-Languages

Linguists do not use the term proto- in a consistent way, so 1 should be
clear about what I mean by Proto-Anatolian. Proto-Anatolian is the lan-
guage that was immediately ancestral to the three known daughter lan-
guages in the Anatolian branch. Proto-Anatolian can be described fairly
accurately on the basis of the shared traits of Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic.
But Proto-Anatolian occupies just the later portion of an undocumented
period of linguistic change that must have occurred between it and Proto-
Indo-European. The hypothetical language stage in between can be called
Pre- Anatolian. Proto-Anatolian is a fairly concrete linguistic entity closely
related to its known daughters. But Pre-Anatolian represents an evolution-
ary period. Pre-Anatolian is a phase defined by Proto-Anatolian at one end
and Proto-Indo-European at the other. How can we determine when Pre-
Anatolian separated from Proto-Indo-European?

The ultimate age of the Anatolian branch is based partly on objective
external evidence (dated documents at Kanesh), partly on presumed rates
of language change over time, and partly on internal evidence within the
Anatolian languages. The Anatolian languages are quite different phono-
logically and grammatically from all the other known Indo-European
daughter languages. They are so peculiar that many specialists think they
do not really belong with the other daughters.

Many of the peculiar features of Anatolian look like archaisms, charac-
teristics thought to have existed in an extremely early stage of Proto-

Last Speakers of Proto-Indo-European 47

Indo-European. For example, Hittite had a kind of consonant that has
become famous in Indo-European linguistics (yes, consonants can be fa-
mous): h p a guttural sound or laryngeal. In 1879 a Swiss linguist, Ferdi-
nand de Saussure, realized that several seemingly random differences in
vowel pronunciation between the Indo-European languages could be
brought under one explanatory rule if he assumed that the pronunciation of
these vowels had been affected by a “lost” consonant that no longer existed
in any Indo-European language. He proposed that such a lost sound had
existed in Proto-Indo-European. It was the first time a linguist had been so
bold as to reconstruct a feature for Proto-Indo-European that no longer ex-
isted in any Indo-European language. The discovery and decipherment of
Hittite forty years later proved Saussure right. In a stunning confirmation of
the predictive power of comparative linguistics, the Hittite laryngeal h 2 (and
traces of a slightly different laryngeal, h ? ) appeared in Hittite inscriptions in
just those positions Saussure had predicted for his “lost” consonant. Most
Indo-Europeanists now accept that archaic Proto-Indo-European contained
laryngeal sounds (probably three different ones, usually transcribed as *h p
*b p *h ? ) that were preserved clearly only in the Anatolian branch. 10 The best
explanation for why Anatolian has laryngeals is that Pre-Anatolian speakers
became separated from the Proto-Indo-European language community at a
very early date, when a laryngeal-rich phonology was still characteristic of
archaic Proto-Indo-European. But then what does archaic mean? What,
exactly, did Pre-Anatolian separate from?

The Indo-Hittite Hypothesis

The Anatolian branch either lost or never possessed other features that
were present in all other Indo-European branches. In verbs, for example,
the Anatolian languages had only two tenses, a present and a past, whereas
the other ancient Indo-European languages had as many as six tenses. In
nouns, Anatolian had just animate and neuter; it had no feminine case.
The other ancient Indo-European languages had feminine, masculine,
and neuter cases. The Anatolian languages also lacked the dual, a form
that was used in other early Indo-European languages for objects that
were doubled like eyes or ears. (Example: Sanskrit devas one god’, but devau
‘double gods’.) Alexander Lehrman identified ten such traits that prob-
ably were innovations in Proto-Indo-European after Pre-Anatolian split
away. 11

For some Indo-Europeanists these traits suggest that the Anatolian
branch did not develop from Proto-Indo-European at all but rather evolved

48 Chapter j

from an older Pre-Proto-Indo-European ancestor. This ancestral language
was called Indo-Hittite by William Sturtevant. According to the Indo-
Hittite hypothesis, Anatolian is an Indo-European language only in the
broadest sense, as it did not develop from Proto-Indo-European. But it did
preserve, uniquely, features of an earlier language community from which
they both evolved. I cannot solve the debate over the categorization of
Anatolian here, although it is obviously true that Proto-Indo-European
must have evolved from an earlier language community, and we can use
Indo-Hittite to refer to that hypothetical earlier stage. The Proto-Indo-
European language community was a chain of dialects with both geo-
graphic and chronological differences. The Anatolian branch seems to
have separated from an archaic chronological stage in the evolution of
Proto-Indo-European, and it probably separated from a different geo-
graphic dialect as well, but I will call it archaic Proto-Indo-European
rather than Indo-Hittite. 12

A substantial period of time is needed for the Pre-Anatolian phase.
Craig Melchert and Alexander Lehrman agreed that a separation date
of about 4000 BCE between Pre-Anatolian and the archaic Proto-Indo-
European language community seems reasonable. The millennium or so
around 4000 BCE, say 4500 to 3500 BCE, constitutes the latest window
within which Pre-Anatolian is likely to have separated.

Unfortunately the oldest daughter of Proto-Indo-European looks so
peculiar that we cannot be certain she is a daughter rather than a cousin.
Pre-Anatolian could have emerged from Indo-Hittite, not from Proto-
Indo-European. So we cannot confidently assign a terminal date to Proto-
Indo-European based on the birth of Anatolian.

The Next Oldest Inscriptions: Greek and Old Indic

Luckily we have well-dated inscriptions in two other Indo-European lan-
guages from the same era as the Hittite empire. The first was Greek, the
language of the palace-centered Bronze Age warrior kings who ruled at
Mycenae, Pylos, and other strongholds in Greece beginning about 1650
BCE. The Mycenaean civilization appeared rather suddenly with the con-
struction of the spectacular royal Shaft Graves at Mycenae, dated about
1650 BCE, about the same time as the rise of the Hittite empire in Ana-
tolia. The Shaft Graves, with their golden death masks, swords, spears,
and images of men in chariots, signified the elevation of a new Greek-
speaking dynasty of unprecedented wealth whose economic power de-
pended on long-distance sea trade. The Mycenaean kingdoms were

Last Speakers oj Proto-Indo-European 4(4

destroyed during the same period of unrest and pillage that brought down
the Hittite Empire about 1150 BCE. Mycenaean Greek, the language of
palace administration as recorded in the Linear B tablets, was clearly
Greek, not Proto-Greek, by 1450 BCE, the date of the oldest preserved
inscriptions. The people who spoke it were the models for Nestor and
Agamemnon, whose deeds, dimly remembered and elevated to epic, were
celebrated centuries later by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey . We do
not know when Greek speakers appeared in Greece, but it happened no
later than 1650 BCE. As with Anatolian, there are numerous indications
that Mycenaean Greek was an intrusive language in a land where non-
Greek languages had been spoken before the Mycenaean age. 13 The Myce-
naeans almost certainly were unaware that another Indo-European
language was being used in palaces not far away.

Old Indic, the language of the Rig Veda, was recorded in inscriptions
not long after 1500 BCE but in a puzzling place. Most Vedic specialists
agree that the 1,028 hymns of the Rig Veda were compiled into what be-
came the sacred form in the Punjab, in northwestern India and Pakistan,
probably between about 1500 and 1300 BCE. But the deities, moral con-
cepts, and Old Indic language of the Rig Veda first appeared in written
documents not in India but in northern Syria} 4

The Mitanni dynasty ruled over what is today northern Syria between
1500 and 1350 bce. The Mitanni kings regularly spoke a / 70 / 7 -Indo-
European language, Hurrian, then the dominant local language in much
of northern Syria and eastern Turkey. Like Hattie, Hurrian was a native
language of the Anatolian uplands, related to the Caucasian languages.
But all the Mitanni kings, first to last, took Old Indic throne names, even
if they had Hurrian names before being crowned. Tus ratta I was Old In-
dic Tvesa-ratha ‘having an attacking chariot’, Artatama I was Rta-dhaaman
having the abode of rta, Artass’umara was Rta-smara ‘remembering r’ta’,
and Sattuara I was Satvar ‘warrior’. 1 ^ The name of the Mitanni capital
city, Wassukanni, was Old Indic vasu-khani , literally “wealth-mine.” The
Mitanni were famous as charioteers, and, in the oldest surviving horse-
training manual in the world, a Mitanni horse trainer named Kikkuli (a
Hurrian name) used many Old Indic terms for technical details, including
horse colors and numbers of laps. The Mitanni military aristocracy was
composed of chariot warriors called maryanna , probably from an Indic
term mdrya meaning “young man,” employed in the Rig Veda to refer to
the heavenly war-band assembled around Indra. Several royal Mitanni
names contained the Old Indic term rta, which meant “cosmic order and
truth, the central moral concept of the Rig Veda. The Mitanni king

jo Chapter j

Kurtiwaza explicitly named four Old Indie gods (Indra, Varuna, Mithra,
and the Nasatyas), among many native Hurrian deities, to witness his
treaty with the Hittite monarch around 1380 BCE. And these were not
just any Old Indie gods. Three of them — Indra, Varuna, and the Nasatyas
or Divine Twins — were the three most important deities in the Rig Veda.
So the Mitanni texts prove not only that the Old Indie language existed
by 1500 BCE but also that the central religious pantheon and moral be-
liefs enshrined in the Rig Veda existed equally early.

Why did Hurrian-speaking kings in Syria use Old Indie names, words,
and religious terms in these ways? A good guess is that the Mitanni king-
dom was founded by Old Indie-speaking mercenaries, perhaps charioteers,
who regularly recited the kinds of hymns and prayers that were collected
at about the same time far to the east by the compilers of the Rig Veda.
Hired by a Hurrian king about 1500 BCE, they usurped his throne and
founded a dynasty, a very common pattern in Near Eastern and Iranian
dynastic histories. The dynasty quickly became Hurrian in almost every
sense but clung to a tradition of using Old Indie royal names, some Vedic
deity names, and Old Indie technical terms related to chariotry long after
its founders faded into history. This is, of course, a guess, but something
like it seems almost necessary to explain the distribution and usage of Old
Indie by the Mitanni.

The Mitanni inscriptions establish that Old Indie was being spoken
before 1500 BCE in the Near East. By 1500 BCE Proto-Indo-European
had differentiated into at least Old Indie, Mycenaean Greek, and the
three known daughters of Proto-Anatolian. What does this suggest about
the terminal date for Proto-Indo-European?

Counting the Relatives: How Many in 1500 BCE?

To answer this question we first have to understand where Greek and Old
Indie are placed among the known branches of the Indo-European family.
Mycenaean Greek is the oldest recorded language in the Greek branch.
It is an isolated language; it has no recorded close relatives or sister lan-
guages. It probably had unrecorded sisters, but none survived in written
records. The appearance of the Shaft-Grave princes about 1650 BCE
represents the latest possible arrival of Greek speakers in Greece. The
Shaft-Grave princes probably already spoke an early form of Greek, not
Proto-Greek, since their descendants’ oldest preserved inscriptions at about
1450 BCE were in Greek. Proto-Greek might be dated at the latest be-
tween about 2000 and 1650 BCE. Pre-Greek, the phase that preceded

Last Speakers of Proto-Indo-European 5 /

Proto-Greek, probably originated as a dialect of late Proto-Indo-European
at least five hundred to seven hundred years before the appearance of My-
cenaean Greek, and very probably earlier —minimally about 2400-2200
BCE. The terminal date for Proto-Indo-European can be set at about
2400-2200 BCE — it could not have been later than this — from the per-
spective of the Greek branch. What about Old Indie?

Unlike Mycenaean Greek, Old Indie does have a known sister language,
Avestan Iranian, which we must take into account. Avestan is the oldest of
the Iranian languages that would later be spoken by Persian emperors and
Scythian nomads alike, and today are spoken in Iran and Tajikistan.
Avestan Iranian was the language of the Avesta , the holiest text of Zoras-
trianism. The oldest parts of the Avesta , the Gathas , probably were com-
posed by Zoroaster (the Greek form of the name) or by Zarathustra (the
original Iranian form) himself. Zarathustra was a religious reformer who
lived in eastern Iran, judging from the places he named, probably between
1200 and 1000 BCE. 16 His theology was partly a reaction against the
glorification of war and blood sacrifice by the poets of the Rig Veda. One
of the oldest Gathas was the lament of the cow,” a protest against cattle
stealing from the cow’s point of view. But the Avesta and the Rig Veda
were closely related in both language and thought. They used the same
deity names (although Old Indie gods were demonized in the Avesta) y
employed the same poetic conventions, and shared specific rituals. For
example, they used a cognate term for the ritual of spreading straw for the
seat of the attending god before a sacrifice (Vedic barhis, Avestan bares -
man)\ and both traditions termed a pious man w one who spread the straw.”
In many small details they revealed their kinship in a shared Indo-Iranian
past. The two languages, Avestan Iranian and Old Indie, developed from
a shared parent language, Indo-Iranian, which is not documented.

The Mitanni inscriptions establish that Old Indie had appeared as a
distinct language by 1500 BCE. Common Indo-Iranian must be earlier. It
probably dates back at least to 1700 BCE. Proto-Indo-Iranian — a dialect
that had some of the innovations of Indo-Iranian but not yet all of them —
has to be placed earlier still, at or before 2000 BCE. Pre-Indo-Iranian was
an eastern dialect of Proto-Indo-European, and must then have existed at
the latest around 2500-2300 BCE. As with Greek, the period from 2500
to 2300 BCE, give or take a few centuries, is the minimal age for the sepa-
ration of Pre-Indo-Iranian from Proto-Indo-European.

So the terminal date for Proto-Indo-European — the date after which
our reconstructed form of the language becomes an anachronism — can be
set around 2500 BCE, more or less, from the perspective of Greek and

52 Chapter j

Old Indie. It might be extended a century or two later, but, as far as these
two languages are concerned, a terminal date much later than 2500 BCE
say, as late as 2000 BCE — is impossible. And, of course, Anatolian must
have separated long before 2500 BCE. By about 2500 BCE Proto-Indo-
European had changed and fragmented into a variety of late dialects and
daughter languages — including at least the Anatolian group, Pre-Greek
and Pre-Indo-lranian. Can other daughters be dated to the same period. - '
How many other daughters existed by 2500 BCE?

More Help from the Other Daughters: Who's the Oldest of Them All?

In fact, some other daughters not only can be placed this early — they must
be. Again, to understand why, we have to understand where Greek and Old
Indie stand within the known branches of the Indo-European language
family. Neither Greek nor Indo-Iranian can be placed among the very old-
est Indo-European daughter branches. They are the oldest daughters to
survive in inscriptions (along with Anatolian), but that is an accident of
history (table 3.1). From the perspective of historical linguistics, Old Indie
and Greek must be classified as late Indo-European daughters. Why?

Linguists distinguish older daughter branches from younger ones on
the basis of shared innovations and archaisms. Older branches seem to
have separated earlier because they lack innovations characteristic of the
later branches, and they retain archaic features. Anatolian is a good ex-
ample; it retains some phonetic traits that definitely are archaic (laryn-
geals) and lacks other features that probably represent innovations.
Indo-Iranian, on the other hand, exhibits three innovations that identify it
as a later branch.

Indo-Iranian shared one innovation with a group of languages that lin-
guists labeled the sat 3m group: Indo-Iranian, Slavic, Baltic, Albanian,
Armenian, and perhaps Phrygian. Among the sat mi languages, Proto-
Indo-European *k- before a front vowel (like *k'mtom ‘hundred’) was regu-
larly shifted to s- or s- (like Avestan Iranian sat mi). This same group of
languages exhibited a second shared innovation: Proto-Indo-European
*k w - (called a labiovelar, pronounced like the first sound in queen ) changed
to k-. The third innovation was shared between just a subgroup within the
satsm languages: Indo-Iranian, Baltic, and Slavic. It is called the ruki- rule:
the original sound [*-s] in Proto-Indo-European was shifted to [*-sh] after
the consonants r, u, k, and i. Language branches that do not share these
innovations are assumed to have split away and lost regular contact with
the sat mi and ruki groups before they occurred.

1

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Z.«rt Speakers of Proto-Indo-European jj

The Celtic and Italic branches do not display the satm innovations or
the ruki rule; both exhibit a number of archaic features and also share a
few innovations. Celtic languages, today limited to the British Isles and
nearby coastal France, were spoken over much of central and western
Europe, from Austria to Spain, around 600-300 BCE, when the earli-
est records of Celtic appeared. Italic languages were spoken in the Ital-
ian peninsula at about 600-500 BCE, but today, of course, Latin has
many daughters — the Romance languages. In most comparative studies
of the Indo-European languages, Italic and Celtic would be placed
among the earliest branches to separate from the main trunk. The peo-
ple who spoke Pre-Celtic and Pre-Italic lost contact with the eastern
and northern groups of Indo-European speakers before the satm and
ruki innovations occurred. We cannot yet discuss where the boundaries
of these linguistic regions were, but we can say that Pre-Italic and Pre-
Celtic departed to form a western regional-chronological block, whereas
the ancestors of Indo-Iranian, Baltic, Slavic, and Armenian stayed be-
hind and shared a set of later innovations. Xocharian, the easternmost
Indo-European language, spoken in the Silk Road caravan cities of the
Tarim Basin in northwestern China, also lacked the satm and ruki in-
novations, so it seems to have departed equally early to form an eastern
branch.

Greek shared a series of linguistic features uniquely with the Indo-
Iranian languages, but it did not adopt the satm innovation or the ruki
rule. 1 ' Pre-Greek and Pre-Indo-Iranian must have developed in neighbor-
ing regions, but the speakers of Pre-Greek departed before the satm or
the ruki innovations appeared. The shared features included morphologi-
cal innovations, conventions in heroic poetry, and vocabulary. In morphol-
®Sy> Greek and Indo-Iranian shared two important innovations: the
augment, a prefix e- before past tenses (although, because it is not well at-
tested in the earliest forms of Greek and Indo-Iranian, the augment might
have developed independently in each branch much later); and a medio-
passive verb form with a suffixed In weapon vocabulary they shared
common terms for bow {*taksos), arrow ( *eis -), bowstring ( *jya-\ and club
( uagros), or cudgel, the weapon specifically associated with Indra and his
Greek counterpart Herakles. In ritual they shared a unique term for a
specific ritual, the hecatomb , or sacrifice of a hundred cows; and they re-
ferred to the gods with the same shared epithet, those who give riches. They
retained shared cognate names for at least three deities: (1) Erinys/Saran,
yu, a horse-goddess in both traditions, born of a primeval creator-god
and the mother of a winged horse in Greek or of the Divine Twins in

56 Chapter j

Indo-Iranian, who are often represented as horses; (2) Kerberos/Sarvara ,
the multiheaded dog that guarded the entrance to the Otherworld; and (3)
Pan/Pu$an, a pastoral god that guarded the flocks, symbolically associated
in both traditions with the goat. In both traditions, goat entrails were the
specific funeral offering made to the hell-hound Kerberos/Sarvara during a
funeral ceremony. In poetry, ancient Greek, like Indo-Iranian, had two
kinds of verse: one with a twelve-syllable line (the Sapphic/Alcaic line)
and another with an eight-syllable line. No other Indo-European poetic
tradition shared both these forms. They also shared a specific poetic for-
mula, meaning “fame everlasting,” applied to heroes, found in this exact
form only in the Rig Veda and Homer. Both Greek and Indo-Iranian used
a specific verb tense, the imperfect, in poetic narratives about past
events. 18

It is unlikely that such a large bundle of common innovations, vocab-
ulary, and poetic forms arose independently in two branches. Therefore,
Pre-Greek and Pre-Indo-Iranian almost certainly were neighboring late
Indo-European dialects, spoken near enough to each other so that words
related to warfare and ritual, names of gods and goddesses, and poetic
forms were shared. Greek did not adopt the ruki rule or the sat?m shift,
so we can define two strata here: the older links Pre-Greek and Pre-
Indo-Iranian, and the later separates Proto-Greek from Proto-Indo-
Iranian.

The Birth Order of the Daughters and the Death of the Mother

The ruki rule, the centum/satm split, and sixty-three possible variations on
seventeen other morphological and phonological traits were analyzed
mathematically to generate thousands of possible branching diagrams by
Don Ringe, Wendy Tarnow, and colleagues at the University of Pennsyl-
vania. 19 The cladistic method they used was borrowed from evolutionary
biology but was adapted to compare linguistic innovations rather than ge-
netic ones. A program selected the trees that emerged most often from
among all possible evolutionary trees. The evolutionary trees identified by
this method agreed well with branching diagrams proposed on more tra-
ditional grounds. The oldest branch to split away was, without any doubt,
Pre-Anatolian (figure 3.2). Pre-Tocharian probably separated next, al-
though it also showed some later traits. The next branching event sepa-
rated Pre-Celtic and Pre-Italic from the still evolving core. Germanic has
some archaic traits that suggest an initial separation at about the same
time as Pre-Celtic and Pre-Italic, but then later it was strongly affected by

Last Speakers of Proto-Indo-European

(PIE = Proto-Indo-European) 4,500 BCE

Indo-Iranian Balto-Slavic

Figure 3.2 The best branching diagram according to the
Ringe-Warnow-Taylor (2002) cladistic method, with
the minimal separation dates suggested in this chapter.
Germanic shows a mixture of archaic and derived traits
that make its place uncertain; it could have branched off
at about the same time as the root of Italic and Celtic,
although here it is shown branching later because it also
shared many traits with Pre-Baltic and Pre-Slavic.

borrowing from Celtic, Baltic, and Slavic, so the precise time it split away
is uncertain. Pre-Greek separated after Italic and Celtic, followed by
Indo-Iranian. The innovations of Indo-Iranian were shared (perhaps later)
with several language groups in southeastern Europe (Pre-Armenian,
Pre-Albanian, partly in Pre-Phrygian) and in the forests of northeastern
Europe (Pre-Baltic and Pre-Slavic). Common Indo-Iranian, we must re-
member, is dated at the latest to about 1700 BCE. The Ringe-Tarnow
branching diagram puts the separations of Anatolian, Tocharian, Italic,
Celtic, German, and Greek before this. Anatolian probably had split away
before 3500 BCE, Italic and Celtic before 2500 BCE, Greek after 2500
BCE, and Proto-Indo-Iranian by 2000 BCE. Those are not meant to be
exact dates, but they are in the right sequence, are linked to dated inscrip-
tions in three places (Greek, Anatolian, and Old Indie), and make sense.

58 Chapter^

By 2500 BCE the language that has been reconstructed as Proto-Indo-
European had evolved into something else or, more accurately, into a vari-
ety of things, — late dialects such as Pre-Greek and Pre-Indo-Iranian that
continued to diverge in different ways in different places. The Indo-
European languages that evolved after 2500 BCE did not develop from
Proto-Indo-European but from a set of intermediate Indo-European lan-
guages that preserved and passed along aspects of the mother tongue. By
2500 BCE Proto-Indo-European was a dead language.

Chapter Four

Language and Time 2
Wool , Wheels , and Proto-Indo-European

If Proto-Indo-European was dead as a spoken language by 2500 BCE,
when was it born? Is there a date after which Proto-Indo-European must
have been spoken? This question can be answered with surprising preci-
sion. Two sets of vocabulary terms identify the date after which Proto-
Indo-European must have been spoken: words related to woven wool textiles,
and to wheels and wagons. Neither woven wool textiles nor wheeled vehi-
cles existed before about 4000 BCE. It is possible that neither existed be-
fore about 3500 BCE. Yet Proto-Indo-European speakers spoke regularly
about wheeled vehicles and some sort of wool textile. This vocabulary sug-
gests that Proto-Indo-European was spoken after 4000-3500 BCE. As
the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary for wheeled vehicles has already been
described in chapter 2, let us begin here with the Proto-Indo-European
terms for wool.

The Wool Vocabulary

Woven woolen textiles are made from long wool fibers of a type that did
not grow on wild sheep. Sheep with long wooly coats are genetic mutants
bred just for that trait. If Proto-Indo-European contained words referring
unequivocally to woven woolen textiles, then those words had to have en-
tered Proto-Indo-European after the date when wool sheep were devel-
oped. But if we are to use the wool vocabulary as a dating tool, we need to
know both the exact meaning of the reconstructed roots and the date
when wool sheep first appeared. Both issues are problematic.

Proto-Indo-European contained roots that meant “sheep,” “ewe,” “ram,”
and “lamb” — a developed vocabulary that undoubtedly indicates familiar-
ity with domesticated sheep. It also had a term that in most daughter
cognates meant “wool”. The root *HwlHn - is based on cognates in almost

6o Chapter 4

Wool \ Wheels , and Proto-Indo-European 61

all branches from Welsh to Indie and including Hittite, so it goes back to
the archaic Proto-Indo-European era before the Anatolian branch split
away. The stem is unusually long, however, suggesting to Bill Darden of
the University of Chicago that it was either borrowed or derived by the
addition of the -n- suffix from a shorter, older root. He suggested that the
shorter root, and the earliest form, was *Hwel- or *Hwol- (transcribed as
*Hw(e/o)l). Its cognates in Baltic, Slavic, Greek, Germanic, and Armenian
meant “felt,” “roll,” “beat,” and “press.” “Felt” seems to be the meaning that
unites them, since the verbs describe operations in the manufacture of felt.
Felt is made by beating or pressing wool fibers until they are pounded into
a loose mat. The mat is then rolled up and pressed tightly, unrolled and
wetted, then rolled and pressed again, all this repeated until the mat is
tight. Wool fibers are curly, and they interlock during this pressing pro-
cess. The resulting felt textile is quite warm. The winter tents of Eurasian
nomads and the winter boots of Russian farmers (made to fit over regular
shoes) were traditionally made from felt. If Darden is right, the most an
cient Pre-Proto-Indo-European wool root, *Hw(e/o)l-\ was connected
with felt. The derivative stem *HwlHn-, the root retained in both Anato-
lian and classic Proto-Indo-European, meant “wool” or something made
of wool, but we cannot be certain that it referred to a woven wool textile.
It could have referred to the short, natural wool that grew on wild sheep or
to some kind of felt textile made of short wool. 1

Sheep ( Ovis orientalis) were domesticated in the period from about 8000
to 7500 BCE in eastern Anatolia and western Iran as a captive source of
meat, which is all they were used for during the first four thousand years
of sheepherding. They were covered not with wool but with long, coarse
hair called kemp. Wool grew on these sheep as an insulating undercoat
of very short curly fibers that, in the words ol textile specialist Elizabeth
Barber, were “structurally unspinnable.” This “wild” short wool was molted
at the end of the winter. In fact, the annual shedding of short wild wool
might have created the first crude (and smelly) felts, when sheep slept on
their own damp sheddings. The next step would have been to intentionally
pluck the wool when it loosened, just before it was shed. But woven wool
textiles required wool thread.

Wool thread could only be made from unnaturally long wool fibers, as
the fibers had to be long enough to cling to each other when pulled apart.
A spinner of wool would pull a clump of fibers from a mass of long- fiber
wool and twist them into a thread by handfeeding the strand onto a twirl-
ing weighted stick, or hand spindle (the spinning wheel was a much later
invention). The spindle was suspended in the air and kept twirling with a

motion of the wrist. The spindle weights are called spindle whorls, and they
are just about the only evidence that survives of ancient thread making,
although it is difficult to distinguish spindle whorls used for making
woolen thread from those used for making flaxen thread, apparently the
oldest kind of thread made by humans. Linen made from flax was the old-
est woven textile. Woolen thread was invented only after spinners of flax
and other plant fibers began to obtain the longer animal fibers that grew
on mutant wool sheep. When did this genetic alteration happen? The con-
ventional wisdom is that wool sheep appeared about 4000-3500 BCE. 2

In southern Mesopotamia and western Iran, where the first city-based
civilizations appeared, woven wool textiles were an important part of the
earliest urban economies. Wool absorbed dye much better than linen did,
so woolen textiles were much more colorful, and the color could be woven
in with differently colored threads rather than stamped on the textile sur-
face (apparently the oldest kind of textile decoration). But almost all the
evidence for wool production appears in the Late Uruk period or later,
after about 3350 BCE/ Because wool itself is rarely preserved, the evi-
dence comes from animal bones. When sheep are raised for their wool,
the butchering pattern should show three features: (1) sheep or goats
(which differ only in a few bones) or both should make up the majority of
the herded animals; (2) sheep, the wool producers, should greatly outnum-
ber goats, the best milk producers; and (3) the sheep should have been
butchered at an advanced age, after years of wool production. Susan Pol-
lock’s review of the faunal data from eight Uruk-period sites in southern
Mesopotamia, northern Mesopotamia, and western Iran showed that the
shift to a wool-sheep butchering pattern occurred in this heartland of cit-
ies no earlier than the Late Uruk period, after 3350 BCE (figure 4.1).
Early and Middle Uruk sheep (4000—3350 BCE) did not show a wool-
butchering pattern. This Mesopotamian/western Iranian date for wool
sheep was confirmed at Arslantepe on the upper Euphrates in eastern
Anatolia. Here, herds were dominated by cattle and goats before 3350
BCE (phase VII), but in the next phase (Via) Late Uruk pottery ap-
peared, and sheep suddenly rose to first place, with more than half of them
living to maturity. 4

The animal-bone evidence from the Near East suggests that wool sheep
appeared after about 3400 BCE. Because sheep were not native to Europe,
domesticated Near Eastern sheep were imported to Europe by the first
farmers who migrated to Europe from Anatolia about 6500 BCE. But the
mutation for longer wool might have appeared as an adaptation to cold
winters after domesticated sheep were introduced to northern climates, so

62 Chapter 4

Wool \ Wheels , and Proto-Indo-European 6j

(5) Bronocice; (6) Ketegyhdza; (7) Khvalynsk. After Shishlina 1999.

it would not be surprising if the earliest long-wool sheep were bred in
Europe. At Khvalynsk, a cemetery dated about 4600-4200 BCE on the
middle Volga in Russia, sheep were the principal animal sacrificed in the
graves, and most of them were mature, as if being kept alive for wool or
milk. But animals chosen for sacrifice might have been kept alive for a rit-
ual reason. At Svobodnoe, a farming settlement in the North Caucasus
piedmont in what is now southern Russia, dated between about 4300 and
3700 BCE, sheep were the dominant domesticated animal, and sheep out-
numbered goats by 5 to 1. This is a classic wool-sheep harvesting pattern.
But at other settlements of the same age in the North Caucasus this pattern
is not repeated. A new large breed of sheep appeared in eastern Hungary at
Ketegyhaza in the Cernavoda III-Boleraz period, dated 3600-3200 BCE,
which Sandor Bokonyi suggested was introduced from Anatolia and Mes-
opotamia; at Bronocice in southern Poland, in levels dated to the same
period, sheep greatly outnumbered goats by 20 to 1. But beyond these tan-

talizing cases there was no broad or widespread shift to sheep keeping or to
a wool-butchering pattern in Europe until after about 3300-3100 BCE,
about the same time it occurred in the Near East. 5

No actual woven woolen textiles are firmly dated before about 3000
BCE, but they were very widespread by 2800 BCE. A woven woolen
textile fragment that might predate 3000 BCE was found in a grave in
the North Caucasus Mountains, probably a grave of the Novosvobod-
naya culture (although there is some uncertainty about the provenience).
The wool fibers were dyed dark brown and beige, and then a red dye was
painted on the finished fabric. The Novosvobodnaya culture is dated
between 3400 and 3100 BCE, but this fabric has not been directly
dated. At Shar-i Sokhta, a Bronze Age semi-urban trading center in
east-central Iran, woven woolens were the only kinds of textiles recov-
ered in levels dated 2800-2500 BCE. A woven wool fragment was
found at Clairvaux-les-lacs Station III in France, dated 2900 BCE, so
wool sheep and woven wool textiles were known from France to central
Iran by 2900-2500 BCE. 6

The preponderance of the evidence suggests that woven wool textiles
appeared in Europe, as in the Near East, after about 3300 BCE, although
wool sheep may have appeared earlier than this, about 4000 BCE, in the
North Caucasus Mountains and perhaps even in the steppes. But if the
root *Hw/Hn - referred to the short undercoat wool of “natural” sheep, it
could have existed before 4000 BCE. This uncertainty in meaning weak-
ens the reliability of the wool vocabulary for dating Proto-Indo-European.
The wheeled vehicle vocabulary is different. It refers to very definite ob-
jects (wheels, axles), and the earliest wheeled vehicles are very well dated.
Unlike wool textiles, wagons required an elaborate set of metal tools (chis-
els, axes) that preserve well, the images of wagons are easier to categorize,
and the wagons themselves preserve more easily than textiles.

The Wheel Vocabulary

Proto-Indo-European contained a set of words referring to wheeled
vehicles — wagons or carts or both. We can say with great confidence that
wheeled vehicles were not invented until after 4000 BCE; the surviving
evidence suggests a date closer to 3500 BCE. Before 4000 BCE there
were no wheels or wagons to talk about.

Proto-Indo-European contained at least five terms related to wheels and
wagons, as noted in chapter 2: two words for wheel (perhaps for different
kinds of wheels), one for axle , one for thill (the pole to which the animals

64 Chapter 4

Q *k w ek w los wheel

0 *rot-eh 2 - wheel I

T 'hjhs- thill Q- — ■<
*aks- axle ~L

1 *wegheti convey in a vehicle

SLAVIC

BALTIC

GERMANIC

BALTIC

CCELTI

SLAVIC

TOCHARIAN

IRANIAN

and

INDIC

ITALIC

GREEK

CELTIC

ANATOLIAN

Figure 4.2 The geographic distribution of the Indo-European wheel-wagon
vocabulary.

were yoked), and a verb meaning “to go or convey in a vehicle.” Cognates for
these terms occur in all the major branches of Indo-European, from Celtic
in the west to Vedic Sanskrit and Tocharian in the east, and from Baltic in
the north to Greek in the south (figure 4.2). Most of the terms have a kind
of vowel structure called an o-stem that identifies a late stage in the devel-
opment of Proto-Indo-European; axle was an older n-stem derived from a
word that meant “shoulder.” The o-stems are important, since they appeared
only during the later end of the Proto-Indo-European period. Almost all
the terms are derived from Proto-Indo-European roots, so the vocabulary
for wagons and wheels was not imported from the outside but was created
within the Proto-Indo-European speech community.'

The only branch that might not contain a convincing wheeled-vehicle
vocabulary is Anatolian, as Bill Darden observed. Pwo possible Proto-
Indo-European wheeled-vehicle roots are preserved in Anatolian. One
C hurki - ‘wheel’) is thought to be descended from a Proto-Indo-European
root, because the same root might have yielded Tocharian A warkdnt and
Tocharian B yerkwanto , both meaning “wheel. Tocharian is an extinct
Indo-European branch consisting of two (perhaps three) known lan-
guages, called A and B (and perhaps C), recorded in documents written in

Wool Wheels, and Proto-Indo-European 65

about 500-700 CE by Buddhist monks in the desert caravan cities of the
Tarim Basin in northwestern China. But Tocharian specialist Don Ringe
sees serious difficulties in deriving either Tocharian term from the same
root that yielded Anatolian hurki-, suggesting that the Tocharian and
Anatolian terms were unrelated and therefore do not require a Proto-
Indo-European root. 8 The other Anatolian vehicle term (hissa- ‘thill’ or
‘harness-pole’) has a good Indo-European source, *ei-/*oi- or perhaps
*h 2 ihp~, but its original meaning might have referred to plow shafts rather
than wagon shafts. So we cannot be certain that archaic Proto-Indo-
European, as partially preserved in Anatolian, had a wheeled-vehicle
vocabulary. But the rest of Proto-Indo-European did.

When Was the Wheel Invented?

How do we know that wheeled vehicles did not exist before 4000 BCE?
First, a wheeled vehicle required not just wheels but also an axle to hold the
vehicle. The wheel, axle, and vehicle together made a complicated combi-
nation of load-bearing moving parts. The earliest wagons were planed and
chiseled entirely from wood, and the moving parts had to fit precisely. In a
wagon with a fixed axle and revolving wheels (apparently the earliest type),
the axle arms (the ends of the axle that passed through the center of the
wheel) had to fit snugly, but not too snugly, in the hole through the nave, or
hub. If the fit was too loose, the wheels would wobble as they turned. If it
was too tight, there would be excessive drag on the revolving wheel.

Then there was the problem of the draft — the total weight, with drag,
pulled by the animal team. Whereas a sledge could be pulled using traces,
or flexible straps and ropes, a wagon or cart had to have a rigid draft pole,
or thill, and a rigid yoke. The weight of these elements increased the over-
all draft. One way to reduce the draft was to reduce the diameter of the
axle arms to fit a smaller hole in the wheel. A large-diameter axle was
strong but created more friction between the axle arms and the revolving
wheel. A smaller-diameter axle arm would cause less drag but would break
easily unless the wagon was very narrow. The first wagon-wrights had to
calculate the relationship between drag, axle diameter/strength, axle
length/rigidity, and the width of the wagon bed. In a work vehicle meant
to carry heavy loads, a short axle with small-diameter axle arms and a nar-
row wagon bed made good engineering sense, and, in fact, this is what the
earliest wagons looked like, with a bed only about 1 m wide. Another way
to reduce the draft was to reduce the number of wheels from four to
two — to make a wagon into a cart. The draft of a modern two-wheeled

66 Chapter 4

Wool \ Wheels , and Proto-Indo-European 67

cart is 40% less than a four-wheeled wagon of the same weight , and we can
assume that an advantage of approximately the same magnitude applied to
ancient carts. Carts were lighter and easier to pull, and on rough ground
were less likely to get stuck. Large loads probably still needed wagons, but
carts would have been useful for smaller loads. 9

Archaeological and inscriptional evidence for wheeled vehicles is wide-
spread after about 3400 BCE. One uncertain piece of evidence, a track
preserved under a barrow grave at Flintbek in northern Germany, might
have been made by wheels, and might be as old as 3600 BCE. But the real
explosion of evidence begins about 3400 BCE. Wheeled vehicles ap-
peared in four different media dated between about 3400 and 3000
BCE — a written sign for wagons, two-dimensional images of wagons and
carts, three-dimensional models of wagons, and preserved wooden wheels
and wagon parts themselves. These four independent kinds of evidence
appeared across the ancient world between 3400 and 3000 BCE, about
the same time as wool sheep, and clearly indicate when wheeled vehicles
became widespread. The next four sections discuss the four kinds of evi-
dence. 10

Mesopotamian Wagons : The Oldest Written Evidence

Clay tablets with “wagon” signs impressed on them were found in the
Eanna temple precinct in Uruk, one of the first cities created by humans.
About thirty-nine hundred tablets were recovered from level IVa, the end
of Late Uruk. In these texts, among the oldest documents in the world, a
pictograph (figure 4.3.f) shows a four-wheeled wagon with some kind of
canopy or superstructure. The “wagon” sign occurred just three times in
thirty-nine hundred texts, whereas the sign for “sledge” — a similar kind of
transport, but dragged on runners not rolled on wheels — occurred thirty-
eight times. Wagons were not yet common.

The Eanna precinct tablets were inside Temple C when it burned down.
Charcoal from the Temple C roof timbers yielded four radiocarbon dates
averaging about 3500-3370 BCE. A radiocarbon date tells us when the
dated material, in this case wood, died, not when it was burned. The wood
in the center of any tree is actually dead (something few people realize);
only the outer ring of bark and the sappy wood just beneath it are alive. If
the timbers in Temple C were made from the center of a large tree, the
wood might have died a century or two before the building was burned
down, so the actual age of the Temple C tablets is later than the radiocar-
bon date, perhaps 3300-3100 BCE. Sledges still were far more common

than wagons in the city of Uruk at that date. Ox-drawn canopied sledges
might have preceded canopied wagons as a form of transport (in parades
or processions? harvest rituals?) used by city officials.

A circular clay object that mightbc a model wheel, perhaps from a small
ceramic model of a wagon, was found at the site of Arslantepe in eastern
Turkey, in the ruins of a temple-palace from level Via at the site, also
dated 3400-3100 BCE (figure 4.3.c). Arslantepe was one of a string of
native strongholds along the upper Euphrates River in eastern Anatolia
that entered into close relations with faraway Uruk during the Late Uruk
period. Although the kind of activities that lay behind this “Uruk expan-
sion” northward up the Euphrates valley is not known (see chapter 12), the
possible clay wheel model at Arslantepe could indicate that wagons were
being used in eastern Anatolia during the period of Late Uruk influence.

Wagons and Carts from the Rhine to the Volga:

The Oldest Pictorial Evidence

A two-dimensional image that seems to portray a four-wheeled wagon,
harness pole, and yoke was incised on the surface of a decorated clay mug
of the Trichterbecker (TRB) culture found at the settlement of Bronocice
in southern Poland, dated about 3500-3350 BCE (figure 4.3. b). The TRB
culture is recognized by its distinctive pottery shapes and tombs, which
are found over a broad region in modern Poland, eastern Germany, and
southern Denmark. Most TRB people were simple farmers who lived in
small agricultural villages, but the Bronocice settlement was unusually
large, a TRB town covering fifty-two hectares. The cup or mug with the
wagon image incised on its surface was found in a rubbish pit containing
animal bones, the broken sherds of five clay vessels, and flint tools. Only
this cup had a wagon image. The design is unusual for TRB pottery, not
an accidental combination of normal decorative motifs. Tie cup’s date is
the subject of some disagreement. A cattle bone found in the same pit
yielded an average age of about 3500 BCE, whereas six of the seven other
radiocarbon dates for the settlement around the pit average 150 years later,
about 3350 BCE. The excavators accept an age range spanning these re-
sults, about 3500-3350 BCE. The Bronocice wagon image is the oldest
well-dated image of a wheeled vehicle in the world.

Two other images could be about the same age, although they probably
are somewhat later. An image of two large-horned cattle pulling what seems
to be a two-wheeled cart was scratched on the wall of a Wartberg culture
stone tomb at Lohne-Ziischen I, Hesse, central Germany (figure 4.3.e). The

Wool, Wheels , and Proto-Indo-European 69

grave was reused over a long period of time between about 3400 and 2800
BCE, so the image could have been carved any time in that span. Far away
to the east, a metal cauldron from the Evdik kurgan near the mouth of the
Volga River bears a repousse image that might show a yoke, a wheel, a cart,
and a draft animal; it was found in a grave with objects of the Novosvobod-
naya culture, dated between 3500 and 3100 BCE (figure 4.3.a). These im-
ages of carts and wagons are distributed from central Germany through
southern Poland to the Russian steppes.

Hungarian Wagons: The Oldest Clay Models

The Baden culture is recognized by its pottery and to a certain extent by its
distinctive copper tools, weapons, and ornaments. It appeared in Hungary
about 3500 BCE, and the styles that define it then spread into northern
Serbia, western Romania, Slovakia, Moravia, and southern Poland.
Baden-style polished and channeled ceramic mugs and small pots were
used across southeastern Europe about 3500-3000 BCE. Similarities be-
tween Baden ceramics and those of northwestern Anatolia in the centu-
ries before Troy I suggest one route by which wheeled vehicles could have
spread between Mesopotamia and Europe. Three-dimensional ceramic
models of four-wheeled wagons (figure 4.3.d) were included in sacrificial
deposits associated with two graves of the Late Baden (Pecel) culture at
Budakalasz (Grave 177) and Szigetszentmarton in eastern Hungary, dated
about 3300-3100 BCE. Paired oxen, almost certainly a team, were found
sacrificed in Grave 3 at Budakalasz and in other Late Baden graves in
Hungary. Paired oxen also were placed in graves of the partly contempo-
rary Globular Amphorae culture (3200-2700 BCE) in central and south-
ern Poland. The Baden wagon models are the oldest well-dated
three-dimensional models of wheeled vehicles.

f 6 — 1 CJil iia

•• •• ••

Figure 4.3 The oldest images and models of wagons and wheels: (a) bronze
kettle from Evdik kurgan, lower Volga, Russia, with a design that could repre-
sent, from the left, a yoke, cart, wheel, X-braced floor, and animal head;
(b) image of a four-wheeled wagon on a ceramic vessel from Bronocice, south-
ern Poland; (c) ceramic wheel (from a clay model?) at Arslantepe, eastern
Anatolia; (d) ceramic wagon model from Baden grave 177 at Budakalasz,

Steppe and Bog Vehicles: The Oldest Actual Wagons

Remains of about 250 wagons and carts have been discovered under
earthen burial mounds, or kurgans, in the steppe grasslands of Russia and
Ukraine, dated about 3000-2000 BCE (figures 4.4 and 4.5). The wheels

Figure 4.3 ( continued ) Hungary; (e) cart image with two cattle incised on stone,
from a tomb at Lohne-Ziischen I, Hesse, central Germany; (f) earliest written
symbols for a wagon, on clay tablets from Uruk IVa, southern Iraq. After (a) Shi-
lov and Bagautdinov 1997; (b, d, e) Milisauskas 2002; (c,f) Bakker et al. 1999.

yo Chapter 4

Wool \ Wheels, and Proto-Indo-European yi

Figure 4.4 Preserved wagon parts and wheels: (a) two solid wooden wheels at
the corners of grave 57, Bal’ki kurgan, Ukraine, radiocarbon dated 3330-2900
BCE; (b) Catacomb-culture tripartite wheel with dowels, probably 2600-2200
BCE; (c) preserved axle and reconstructed wagon from various preserved
wheel and wagon fragments in bog deposits in northwestern Germany and
Denmark dated about 3000-2800 BCE. After (a) Lyashko and Otroshchenko
1988; (b) Korpusova and Lyashko 1990; (c) Hayen 1989.

were 50-80 cm in diameter. Some were made of a single plank cut verti-
cally from the trunk of a tree, with the grain (not like a salami). Most
steppe wheels, however, were made of two or three planks cut into circular
segments and then doweled together with mortice-and-tenon joints. In
the center were long tapered naves (hubs), about 20-30 cm wide at the
base and projecting outward about 10-20 cm on either side of the wheel.
The naves were secured to the axle arms by a lynchpin that pinned the

Figure 4.5 The best-preserved wagon graves in the steppes are in the Kuban
River region in southern Russia. This wagon was buried under Ostannii kurgan
1. Radiocarbon dated about 3300—2900 BCE, the upper part of the wagon is
on the left and the lower part, on the right. After Gei 2000, figure 53.

nave to the axle, and between them they kept the wheel from wobbling.
The axles had rounded axle arms for the wheel mounts and were about 2 m
long. The wagons themselves were about 1 m wide and about 2 m long. The
earliest radiocarbon dates on wood from steppe wagons average around
3300-2800 BCE. A wagon or cart grave at Bafki kurgan (grave 57) on
the lower Dnieper was dated 4370±120 BP, or 3330-2880 BCE; and
wood from a wagon buried in Ostanni kurgan 1 (grave 160) on the Kuban
River was dated 4440 ± 40 BP, or 3320-2930 BCE. The probability dis-
tributions for both dates lie predominantly before 3000 BCE, so both ve-
hicles probably date before 3000 BCE. But these funeral vehicles can
hardly have been the very first wagons used in the steppes.

Other wooden wheels and axles have been discovered preserved in bogs
or lakes in central and northern Europe. In the mountains of Switzerland
and southwestern Germany wagon-wrights made the axle arms square and

72 Chapter 4

mortised them into a square hole in the wheel. The middle of the axle was
circular and revolved under the wagon. This revolving-axle design created
more drag and was less efficient than the revolving- wheel design, but it did
not require carving large wooden naves and so the Alpine wheels were
much easier to make. One found near Zurich in a waterlogged settlement
of the Horgen culture (the Pressehaus site) was dated about 3200 BCE by
associated tree-ring dates. The Pressehaus wheel tells us that separate re-
gional European design traditions for wheel making already existed before
3200 BCE. Wooden wheels and axles also have been found in bogs in the
Netherlands and Denmark, providing important evidence on the construc-
tion details of early wagons, but dated after 3000 BCE. They had fixed
axles and revolving wheels, like those of the steppes and central Europe.

The Significance of the Wheel

It would be difficult to exaggerate the social and economic importance of
the first wheeled transport. Before wheeled vehicles were invented, really
heavy things could be moved efficiently only on water, using barges or
rafts, or by organizing a large hauling group on land. Some of the heavier
items that prehistoric, temperate European farmers had to haul across
land all the time included harvested grain crops, hay crops, manure for
fertilizer, firewood, building lumber, clay for pottery making, hides and
leather, and people. In northern and western Europe, some Neolithic
communities celebrated their hauling capacities by moving gigantic stones
to make megalithic community tombs and stone henges; other communi-
ties hauled earth, making massive earthworks. These constructions dem-
onstrated in a visible, permanent way the solidity and strength of the
communities that made them, which depended in many ways on human
hauling capacities. The importance and significance of the village com-
munity as a group transport device changed profoundly with the introduc-
tion of wagons, which passed on the burden of hauling to animals and
machines, where it has remained ever since.

Although the earliest wagons were slow and clumsy, and probably re-
quired teams of specially trained oxen, they permitted single families to
carry manure out to the fields and to bring firewood, supplies, crops, and
people back home. This reduced the need for cooperative communal labor
and made single-family farms viable. Perhaps wagons contributed to the
disappearance of large nucleated villages and the dispersal of many farming
populations across the European landscape after about 3500 BCE. Wagons
were useful in a different way in the open grasslands of the steppes,, where

Wool, Wheels , and Proto-Indo-European yj

the economy depended more on herding than on agriculture. Here wagons
made portable things that had never been portable in bulk — shelter, water,
and food. Herders who had always lived in the forested river valleys and
grazed their herds timidly on the edges of the steppes now could take their
tents, water, and food supplies to distant pastures far from the river valleys.
The wagon was a mobile home that permitted herders to follow their ani-
mals deep into the grasslands and live in the open. Again, this permitted
the dispersal of communities, in this case across interior steppes that earlier
had been almost useless economically. Significant wealth and power could
be extracted from larger herds spread over larger pastures.

Andrew Sherratt bundled the invention of the wheel together with the
invention of the plow, wool sheep, dairying, and the beginning of horse
transport to explain a sweeping set of changes that occurred among Euro-
pean societies about 3500-3000 BCE. The Secondary Products Revolu-
tion (now often shortened to SPR), as Sherratt described it in 1981, was
an economic explanation for widespread changes in settlement patterns,
economy, rituals, and crafts, many of which had been ascribed by an older
generation of archaeologists to Indo-European migrations. (“Secondary
products” are items like wool, milk, and muscular power that can be har-
vested continuously from an animal without killing it, in contrast to “pri-
mary products” such as meat, blood, bone, and hides.) Much of the subject
matter discussed in arguments over the SPR — the diffusion of wagons,
horseback riding, and wool sheep — was also central in discussions of
Indo-European expansions, but, in Sherratt’s view, all of them were de-
rived by diffusion from the civilizations of the Near East rather than from
Indo-Europeans. Indo-European languages were no longer central or even
necessary to the argument, to the great relief of many archaeologists. But
Sherrat s proposal that all these innovations came from the Near East and
entered Europe at about the same time quickly fell apart. Scratch-plows
and dairying appeared in Europe long before 3500 BCE, and horse do-
mestication was a local event in the steppes. An important fragment of the
SPR survives in the conjoined diffusion of wool sheep and wagons across
much of the ancient Near East and Europe between 3500 and 3000 BCE,
but we do not know where either of these innovations started. 11

The clearest proof of the wheels impact was the speed with which
wagon technology spread (figure 4.6), so rapidly, in fact, that we cannot
even say where the wheel-and-axle principle was invented. Most special-
ists assume that the earliest wagons were produced in Mesopotamia, which
was urban and therefore more sophisticated than the tribal societies of Eu-
rope; indeed, Mesopotamia had sledges that served as prototypes. But we

J4 Chapter 4

Wool \ Wheels , and Proto-Indo-European 75

Figure 4.6 Sites with early evidence for wheels or wagons: (1) Uruk; (2) Buda-
kalasz; (3) Arslantepe; (4) Bronicice; (5) Flintbek; (6) Lohne-Zuschen I; (7)
Bal’ki kurgan; (8) Ostannii kurgan; (9) Evdik kurgan. Dashed line indicates
the distribution of about 250 wagon graves in the Pontic-Caspian steppes.

really don’t know. Another prototype existed in Europe in the form of
Mesolithic and Neolithic bent-wood sleds, doweled together with fine
mortice-and-tenon joints; in much of eastern Europe, in fact, right up to
the twentieth century, it made sense to park your wagon or carriage in the
barn for the winter and resort to sleds, far more effective than wheels in
snow and ice. Bent- wood sleds were at least as useful in prehistoric Europe
as in Mesopotamia, and they began to appear in northern Europe as early
as the Mesolithic; thus the skills needed to make wheels and axles existed
in both Europe and the Near East. 12

Regardless of where the wheel-and-axle principle was invented, the
technology spread rapidly over much of Europe and the Near East be-
tween 3400 and 3000 BCE. Proto-Indo-European speakers talked about
wagons and wheels using their own words, created from Indo-European

roots. Most of these words were o-stems, a relatively late development in
Proto-Indo-European phonology. The wagon vocabulary shows that late
Proto-Indo-European was spoken certainly after 4000 BCE, and probably
after 3500 BCE. Anatolian is the only major early Indo-European branch
that has a doubtful wheeled-vehicle vocabulary. As Bill Darden suggested,
perhaps Pre-Anatolian split away from the archaic Proto-Indo-European
dialects before wagons appeared in the Proto-Indo-European homeland.
Pre-Anatolian could have been spoken before 4000 BCE. Late Proto-
Indo-European, including the full wagon vocabulary, probably was spo-
ken after 3500 BCE.

Wagons and the Anatolian Homeland Hypothesis

The wagon vocabulary is a key to resolving the debate about the place and
time of the Proto-Indo-European homeland. The principal alternative to a
homeland in the steppes dated 4000-3500 BCE is a homeland in Anatolia
and the Aegean dated 7000—6500 BCE. Colin Renfrew proposed that
Indo-Hittite (Pre-Proto-Indo-European) was spoken by the first farmers
in southern and western Anatolia at sites such as Qatal Hoyiik dated about
7000 BCE. In his scenario, a dialect of Indo-Hittite was carried to Greece
with the first farming economy by pioneer farmers from Anatolia about
6700-6500 BCE. In Greece, the language of the pioneer farmers devel-
oped into Proto-Indo-European and spread through Europe and the Med-
iterranean Basin with the expansion of the earliest agricultural economy.
By linking the dispersal of the Indo-European languages with the diffu-
sion of the first farming economy, Renfrew achieved an appealingly elegant
solution to the problem of Indo-European origins. Since 1987 he and oth-
ers have shown convincingly that the migrations of pioneer farmers were
one of the principal vectors for the spread of many ancient languages
around the world. The “first-farming/language-dispersal” hypothesis,
therefore, was embraced by many archaeologists. But it required that the
first split between parental Indo-Hittite and Proto-Indo-European began
about 6700-6500 BCE, when Anatolian farmers first migrated to Greece.
By 3500 BCE, the earliest date for wagons in Europe, the Indo-European
language family should have been bushy, multi-branched, and three thou-
sand years old, well past the period of sharing a common vocabulary for
anything. 13

The Anatolian — origin hypothesis raises other problems as well. The
first Neolithic farmers of Anatolia are thought to have migrated there
from northern Syria, which, according to Renfrew’s first-farming/

y6 Chapter 4

Wool, Wheels , and Proto-Indo-European yy

Figure 4. 7 The spread of the first farming economy into Anatolia, probably by
migration from the Core Area in northern Syria, about 7500 BCE. The first pio-
neer farmers probably spoke an Afro-Asiatic language. After Bar-Yosef 2002.

language-dispersal hypothesis, should have resulted in the spread of a
north Syrian Neolithic language to Anatolia (figure 4.7). The indige-
nous languages of northern Syria probably belonged to the Afro-Asiatic
language phylum, like Semitic and most languages of the lowland Near
East. If the first Anatolian farmers spoke an Afro-Asiatic language, it
was that language, not Proto-Indo-European, that should have been
carried to Greece. 14 The earliest Indo-European languages documented
in Anatolia — Hittite, Palaic, and Luwian — showed little diversity, and
only Luwian had a significant number of speakers by 1500 BCE. All
three borrowed extensively from non-Indo-European languages (Hat-
tic, Hurrian, and perhaps others) that seem to have been older, more
prestigious, and more widely spoken. The Indo-European languages of
Anatolia did not have the established population base of speakers, and
also lacked the kind of diversity that would be expected had they been
evolving there since the Neolithic.

Phylogenetic Approaches to Dating Proto-Indo-European

Still, the Anatolian-origin hypothesis has support from new methods in
phylogenetic linguistics. Cladistic methods borrowed from biology have
been used for two purposes: to arrange the Indo-European languages in a
chronological order of branching events (discussed in the previous chap-
ter); and to estimate dates for the separation between any two branches, or
for the root of all branches which is a much riskier proposition. Attaching
time estimates to language branches using evolutionary models based on
biological change is, at best, an uncertain procedure. People intentionally
reshape their speech all the time but cannot intentionally reshape their
genes. The way a linguistic innovation is reproduced in a speech commu-
nity is quite different from the way a mutation is reproduced in a breeding
population. Tire topography of language splits and rejoinings is much
more complex and the speed of language branching far more variable.
Whereas genes spread as whole units, the spread of language is always a
modular process, and some modules (grammar and phonology) are more
resistant to borrowing and spread than others (words).

Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson attempted to work around these
problems by processing a cocktail of cladistic and linguistic methods through
computer programs. They suggested that pre-Anatolian detached from the
rest of the Indo-European community about 6700 BCE (plus or minus
twelve hundred years). Pre-Tocharian separated next (about 5900 BCE),
then pre-Greek/Armenian (about 5300 BCE), and then pre-Indo-Iranian/
Albanian (about 4900 BCE). Finally, a super-clade that included the ances-
tors of pre— Balto-Slavic and pre— Italo-Celto-Germanic separated about
4500 BCE. Archaeology shows that 6700-6500 BCE was about when the
first pioneer farmers left Anatolia to colonize Greece. One could hardly ask
for a closer match between archaeological and phylogentic dates. 15 But how
can the presence of the wagon vocabulary in Proto-Indo-European be syn-
chronized with a first-dispersal date of 6500 BCE?

The Slow Evolution Hypothesis

The wagon vocabulary cannot have been created after Proto-Indo-European
was dead and the daughter languages differentiated. The wagon/wheel terms
do not contain the sounds that would be expected had they been created in
a later daughter language and then borrowed into the others, whereas they
do contain the sounds predicted if they were inherited into the daughter

j8 Chapter 4

branches from Proto-Indo-European. The Proto-Indo-European origin of
the wagon vocabulary cannot be rejected, as it consists of at least five clas-
sic reconstructions. If they are in fact false, then the core methods of com-
parative linguistics — those that determine “genetic” relatedness — would
be so unreliable as to be useless, and the question of Indo-European origins
would be moot.

But could the wagon/wheel vocabularies have been created indepen-
dently by the speakers of each branch from the same Proto-Indo-European
roots? In the example of *k' D ek v los ‘wheel’, Gray suggested (in a comment
on his homepage) that the semantic development from the verb *kwel-
‘turn’ to the noun wheel \ he turner’ was so natural that it could have been
repeated independently in each branch. One difficulty here is that at least
four different verbs meaning “turn” or “roll” or “revolve’ are reconstructed
for Proto-Indo-European, which makes the repeated independent choice
of *kwel- problematic. 16 More critical, the Proto-Indo-European pronun-
ciations of *kwel- and the other wagon terms would not have survived
unchanged through time. They could not have been available frozen in
their Proto-Indo-European phonetic forms to speakers of nine or ten
branches that originated at different times across thousands of years. We
cannot assume stasis in phonetic development for the wheel vocabulary
when all the rest of the vocabulary changed normally with time. But what
if all the other vocabulary also changed very slowly?

This is the solution Renfrew offered (figure 4.8). For the wagon/wheel
vocabulary to be brought into synchronization with the first-farming/lan-
guage-dispersal hypothesis, Proto-Indo-European must have been spoken
for thirty-five hundred years, requiring a very long period when Proto-Indo-
European changed very little. Pre-Proto-Indo-European or Indo-Hittite was
spoken in Anatolia before 6500 BCE. Archaic Proto-Indo-European
evolved as the language of the pioneer farmers in Greece about 6500—6000
BCE. As their descendants migrated northward and westward, and estab-
lished widely scattered Neolithic communities from Bulgaria to Hungary
and Ukraine, the language they carried remained a single language, Archaic
Proto-Indo-European. Their descendants paused for several centuries, and
then a second wave of pioneer migration pushed across the Carpathians into
the North European plain between about 5500 and 5000 BCE with the
Linear Pottery farmers. These farming migrations created Renfrew’s Stage
1 of Proto-Indo-European, which was spoken across most of Europe be-
tween 6500 and 5000 BCE, from the Rhine to the Dnieper and from Ger-
many to Greece. During Renfrew’s Proto-Indo-European Stage 2, between
5000 and 3000 BCE, archaic Proto-Indo-European spread into the steppes

Wool Wheels , and Proto-Indo-European 79

Pre-Proto-Indo-European

(P.P.I.E.)

Early

West Mediterranean P.I.E.

North and
Northwestern P.I.E.

Archaic P.I.E.
(phase 1)

Balkan P.I.E
(phase II)

Proto-

Anatolian

Early Steppe
P.I.E.

Proto- Proto- Proto- Proto- Proto- Proto- Proto- Proto- Proto- Proto- Proto-

Italic Celtic Germanic Baltic Slavic Illyrian Dacian* Greek Phrygian Indo- Tocharian

Thracian I Iranian

Figure 4.8 If Proto-Indo-European spread across Europe with the first farm-
ers about 6500-5500 BCE, it must have remained almost unchanged until
about 3500 BCE, when the wheeled vehicle vocabulary appeared. This diagram
illustrates a division into just three dialects in three thousand years. After Ren-
frew 2001.

and was carried to the Volga with the adoption of herding economies. Late
Proto-Indo-European dialectical features developed, including the appear-
ance of “thematic” inflections such as o-stems, which occur in all the wagon/
wheel terms. These late features were shared across the Proto-Indo-European-
speaking region, which comprised two-thirds of prehistoric Europe. The
wagon vocabulary appeared late in Stage 2 and was adopted from the Rhine
to the Volga. 17

It seems to me that this conception of Proto-Indo-European contains
three fatal flaws. First, for Proto-Indo-European to have remained a uni-
fied dialect chain for more than thirty-five hundred years, from 6500 to
3000 BCE, would require that all its dialects changed at about the same
rate and that the rate was extraordinarily slow. A homogeneous rate of change
across most of Neolithic Europe is very unlikely, as the rate of language
change is affected by a host of local factors, as Sheila Embleton showed,
and these would have varied from one region to the next. And for Proto-
Indo-European only to have evolved from its earlier form to its later form

8o Chapter 4

in thirty-five hundred years would require a pan-European condition of
near stasis in the speed of language change during the Neolithic/Eneo-
lithic, a truly unrealistic demand. In addition, Neolithic Europe evinces
an almost incredible diversity in material culture. This bewildering diver-
sity,” as V. Gordon Childe observed, “though embarrassing to the student
and confusing on a map, is yet a significant feature in the pattern of Euro-
pean prehistory.” 18 Long-established, undisturbed tribal languages tend to
be more varied than tribal material cultures (see chapter 6). One would
therefore expect that the linguistic diversity of Neolithic/Eneolithic Eu-
rope should have been even more bewildering than its material-culture
diversity, not less so, and certainly not markedly less.

Finally, this enormous area was just too big for the survival of a single
language under the conditions of tribal economics and politics, with foot
travel the only means of land transport. Mallory and I discussed the likely
scale of tribal language territories in Neolithic/Eneolithic Europe, and
Nettles described tribal language geographies in West Africa. 14 Most
tribal cultivators in West Africa spoke languages distributed over less than
10,000 km 2 . Foragers around the world generally had much larger lan-
guage territories than farmers had, and shifting farmers in poor environ-
ments had larger language territories than intensive farmers had in rich
environments. Among most tribal farmers the documented size of lan-
guage families— not languages but language families like Indo-European
or Uralic — has usually been significantly less than 200,000 km 2 . Mallory
used an average of 250,000-500,000 km 2 for Neolithic European lan-
guage families just to make room on the large end for the many uncertain-
ties involved. Still, that resulted in twenty to forty language families for
Neolithic Europe.

The actual number of language families in Europe at 3500 BCE prob-
ably was less than this, as the farming economy had been introduced into
Neolithic Europe through a series of migrations that began about 6500
BCE. The dynamics of long-distance migration, particularly among pio-
neer farmers, can lead to the rapid spread of an unusually homogeneous
language over an unusually large area for a few centuries (see chapter 6),
but then local differentiation should have set in. In Neolithic Europe sev-
eral distinct migrations flowed from different demographic recruiting
pools and went to different places, where they interacted with different
Mesolithic forager language groups. This should have produced incipient
language differentiation among the immigrant farmers within five hun
dred to a thousand years, by 6000—5500 BCE. In comparison, the migra-
tions of Bantu-speaking cattle herders across central and southern Africa

Wool \ Wheels , and Proto-Indo-European 81

occurred about two thousand years ago, and Proto-Bantu has diversified
since then into more than five hundred modern Bantu languages assigned
to nineteen branches, still interspersed today with enclaves belonging to
non-Bantu language families. Europe in 3500 BCE, two thousand to
three thousand years after the initial farming migrations, probably had at
least the linguistic diversity of modern central and southern Africa —
hundreds of languages that were descended from the original Neolithic
farmers' speech, interspersed with pre-Neolithic language families of dif-
ferent types. The language of the original migrants to Greece cannot have
remained a single language for three thousand years after its speakers were
dispersed over many millions of square kilometers and several climate
zones. Ethnographic or historic examples of such a large, stable language
territory among tribal farmers simply do not exist.

That the speakers of Proto-Indo-European had wagons and a wagon
vocabulary cannot be brought into agreement with a dispersal date as early
as 6500 BCE. The wagon vocabulary is incompatible with the first-farming/
language-dispersal hypothesis. Proto-Indo-European cannot have been
spoken in Neolithic Greece and still have existed three thousand years later
when wagons were invented. Proto-Indo-European therefore did not spread
with the farming economy. Its first dispersal occurred much later, after
4000 BCE, in a European landscape that was already densely occupied by
people who probably spoke hundreds of languages.

The Birth and Death of Proto-Indo-European

The historically known early Indo-European languages set one chrono-
logical limit on Proto-Indo-European, a terminus ante quem , and the re-
constructed vocabulary related to wool and wheels sets another limit, a
terminus post quem. The latest possible date for Proto-Indo-European can
be set at about 2500 BCE (chapter 3). The evidence of the wool and
wagon/wheel vocabularies establishes that late Proto-Indo-European was
spoken after about 4000-3500 BCE, probably after 3500 BCE. If we in-
clude in our definition of Proto-Indo-European the end of the archaic
Anatolian-like stage, without a securely documented wheeled-vehicle vo-
cabulary, and the dialects spoken at the beginning of the final dispersal
about 2500 BCE, the maximum window extends from about 4500 to
about 2500 BCE. This two thousand-year target guides us to a well-
defined archaeological era.

Within this time frame the archaeology of the Indo-European home-
land is probably consistent with the following sequence, which makes

82 Chapter 4

sense also in terms of both traditional branching studies and cladistics.
Archaic Proto-Indo-European (partly preserved only in Anatolian) prob-
ably was spoken before 4000 BCE; early Proto-Indo-European (partly
preserved in Tocharian) was spoken between 4000 and 3500 BCE; and
late Proto-Indo-European (the source of Italic and Celtic with the wagon/
wheel vocabulary) was spoken about 3500-3000 BCE. Pre-Germanic
split away from the western edge of late Proto-Indo-European dialects
about 3300 BCE, and Pre-Greek split away about 2500 BCE, probably
from a different set of dialects. Pre-Baltic split away from Pre-Slavic and
other northwestern dialects about 2500 BCE. Pre-Indo-Iranian devel-
oped from a northeastern set of dialects between 2500 and 2200 BCE.

Now that the target is fixed in time, we can solve the old and bitter
debate about where Proto-Indo-European was spoken.

U

Chapter Five

Language and Place

The Location of the Proto-Indo-European Homeland

The Indo-European homeland is like the Lost Dutchmans Mine, a legend
of the American West, discovered almost everywhere but confirmed no-
where. Anyone who claims to know its real location is thought to be just a
little odd — or worse. Indo-European homelands have been identified in
India, Pakistan, the Himalayas, the Altai Mountains, Kazakhstan, Russia,
Ukraine, the Balkans, Turkey, Armenia, the North Caucasus, Syria/Leba-
non, Germany, Scandinavia, the North Pole, and (of course) Atlantis. Some
homelands seem to have been advanced just to provide a historical precedent
for nationalist or racist claims to privileges and territory. Others are enthu-
siastically zany. The debate, alternately dryly academic, comically absurd,
and brutally political, has continued for almost two hundred years. 1

This chapter lays out the linguistic evidence for the location of the
Proto-Indo-European homeland. The evidence will take us down a well-
worn path to a familiar destination: the grasslands north of the Black and
Caspian Seas in what is today Ukraine and southern Russia, also known
as the Pontic-Caspian steppes (figure 5.1). Certain scholars, notably Marija
Gimbutas and Jim Mallory, have argued persuasively for this homeland
for the last thirty years, each using criteria that differ in some significant
details but reaching the same end point for many of the same reasons. 2
Recent discoveries have strengthened the Pontic-Caspian hypothesis so
significantly, in my opinion, that we can reasonably go forward on the as-
sumption that this was the homeland.

Problems with the Concept of “the Homeland”

At the start I should acknowledge some fundamental problems. Many of my
colleagues believe that it is impossible to identify any homeland for Proto-
Indo-European, and the following are their three most serious concerns.

OF

AZOV i

CAUCASUS Mfs.

BLACK SEA

'Danube,

500 km c

Steppe

boundary

PIE homeland

Language and Place 85

spoken anywhere. R.M.W. Dixon commented that if we cannot have “abso-
lute certainty” about the grammatical type of a reconstructed language, it
throws doubt over “every detail of the putative reconstruction.” 3 But this is
an extreme demand. The only field in which we can find absolute certainty
is religion. In all other activities we must be content with the best (meaning
both the simplest and the most data-inclusive) interpretation we can ad-
vance, given the data as they now stand. After we accept that this is true in
all secular inquiries, the question of whether Proto-Indo-European can be
thought of as “real” boils down to three sharper criticisms:

a. Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is fragmentary (most of the
language it represents never will be known).

b. The part that is reconstructed is homogenized , stripped of many of
the peculiar sounds of its individual dialects, by the comparative
method (although in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European some
evidence of dialect survives).

c. Proto-Indo-European is not a snapshot of a moment in time but
rather is “timeless”: it averages together centuries or even millennia of
development. In that sense, it is an accurate picture of no single era
in language history.

These seem to be serious criticisms. But if their effect is to make Proto-
Indo-European a mere fantasy, then the English language as presented
in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is a fantasy, too. My dictionary con-
tains the English word ombre (a card game popular in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries) as well as harddisk (a phrase that first appeared
in the 1978 edition). So its vocabulary averages together at least three
hundred years of the language. And its phonology, the “proper” pronucia-
tion it describes, is quite restricted. Only one pronunciation is given for
hard disk , and it is not the Bostonian hard [haahd]. The English of
Merriam-Webster has never been spoken in its entirety by any one per-
son. Nevertheless we all find it useful as a guide to real spoken English.
Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is similar, a dictionary version of a
language. It is not, in itself, a real language, but it certainly refers to one.
And we should remember that Sumerian cuneiform documents and
Egyptian hieroglyphs present exactly the same problems as reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European: the written scripts do not clearly indicate every
sound, so their phonology is uncertain; they contain only royal or priestly
dialects; and they might preserve archaic linguistic forms, like Church
Latin. They are not, in themselves, real languages; they only refer to real
languages. Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is not so different from
cuneiform Sumerian.

Figure 5 J The Proto-Indo-European homeland between about 3S00-3000 BCE.

Problem #i. Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is merely a linguistic
hypothesis , and hypotheses do not have homelands .

This criticism concerns the “reality” of reconstructed Proto-Indo-
European, a subject on which linguists disagree. We should not imagine,
some remind us, that reconstructed Proto-Indo-European was ever actually

84 Chapter^

86 Chapter^

If Proto-Indo-European is like a dictionary, then it cannot be “time-
less.” A dictionary is easily dated by its most recent entries. A dictionary
containing the term hard disk is dated after 1978 in just the way that the
wagon terminology in Proto-Indo-European dates it to a time after about
4000-3500 BCE. It is more dangerous to use negative information as a
dating tool, since many words that really existed in Proto-Indo-European
will never be reconstructed, but it is at least interesting that Proto-Indo-
European does not contain roots for items like spoke, iron, cotton, chariot,
glass, or coffee — things that were invented after the evolution and disper-
sal of the daughter languages, or, in the metaphor we are using, after the
dictionary was printed.

Of course, the dictionary of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is much
more tattered than my copy of Merriam-Webster’s. Many pages have been
torn out, and those that survive are obscured by the passage of time. The
problem of the missing pages bothers some linguists the most. A recon-
structed proto-language can seem a disappointing skeleton with a lot of
bones missing and the placement of others debated between experts. The
complete language the skeleton once supported certainly is a theoretical
construct. So is the flesh-and-blood image of any dinosaur. Nevertheless,
like the paleontologist, I am happy to have even a fragmentary skeleton. I
think of Proto-Indo-European as a partial grammar and a partial set of
pronunciation rules attached to the abundant fragments of a very ancient
dictionary. To some linguists, that might not add up to a “real” language.
But to an archaeologist it is more valuable than a roomful of potsherds.

Problem # 2 . The entire concept of “reconstructed Proto-Indo-European ’ is
a fantasy: the similarities between the Indo-European languages could just
as welt have come about by gradual convergence over thousands of years
between languages that had very different origins.

This is a more radical criticism then the first one. It proposes that the
comparative method is a rigged game that automatically produces a proto-
language as its outcome. The comparative method is said to ignore the
linguistic changes that result from inter-language borrowing and conver-
gence. Gradual convergence between originally diverse tongues, these
scholars claim, might have produced the similarities between the Indo-
European languages. 4 If this were true or even probable there would
indeed be no reason to pursue a single parent of the Indo-European lan-
guages. But the Russian linguist who inspired this line of questioning,
Nikolai S. Trubetzkoy, worked in the 1930s before linguists really had the
tools to investigate his startling suggestion.

Language and Place 8y

Since then, quite a few linguists have taken up the problem of conver-
gence between languages. They have greatly increased our understanding
of how convergence happens and what its linguistic effects are. Although
they disagree strongly with one another on some subjects, all recent stud-
ies of convergence accept that the Indo-European languages owe their
essential similarities to descent from a common ancestral language, and
not to convergence. 5 Of course, some convergence has occurred between
neighboring Indo-European languages — it is not a question of all or
nothing — but specialists agree that the basic structures that define the
Indo-European language family can only be explained by common de-
scent from a mother tongue.

There are three reasons for this unanimity. First, the Indo-European
languages are the most thoroughly studied languages in the world — sim-
ply put, we know a lot about them. Second, linguists know of no language
where bundled similarities of the kinds seen among the Indo-European
languages have come about through borrowing or convergence between
languages that were originally distinct. And, finally, the features known
to typify creole languages — languages that are the product of convergence
between two or more originally distinct languages — are not seen among
the Indo-European languages. Creole languages are characterized by
greatly reduced noun and pronoun inflections (no case or even single/plural
markings); the use of pre-verbal particles to replace verb tenses (“we bin
get” for “we got”); the general absence of tense, gender, and person inflec-
tions in verbs; a severely reduced set of prepositions; and the use of re-
peated forms to intensify adverbs and adjectives. In each of these features
Proto-Indo-European was the opposite of a typical creole. It is not possible
to classify Proto-Indo-European as a creole by any of the standards nor-
mally applied to creole languages. 6

Nor do the Indo-European daughter languages display the telltale signs
of creoles. This means that the Indo-European vocabularies and grammars
replaced competing languages rather than creolizing with them. Of course,
some back-and-forth borrowing occurred — it always does in cases of lan-
guage contact — but superficial borrowing and creolization are very differ-
ent things. Convergence simply cannot explain the similarities between the
Indo-European languages. If we discard the mother tongue, we are left
with no explanation for the regular correspondences in sound, morphology,
and meaning that define the Indo-European language family.

Problem #3. Even if there was a homeland where Proto-Indo-European

was spoken y you cannot use the reconstructed vocabulary to find it because

88 Chapter 5

the reconstructed vocabulary is full of anachronisms that never existed in

Proto-Indo-European.

This criticism, like the last one, reflects concerns about recent inter-
language borrowing, focused here on just the vocabulary. Of course, many
borrowed words are known to have spread through the Indo-European
daughter languages long after the period of the proto-language — recent
examples are coffee (borrowed from Arabic through Turkish) and tobacco
(from Carib). The words for these items sound alike and have the same
meanings in the different Indo-European languages, but few linguists
would mistake them for ancient inherited words. Their phonetics are non-
Indo-European, and their forms in the daughter branches do not represent
what would be expected from inherited roots.' Terms like coffee are not
a significant source of contamination.

Historical linguists do not ignore borrowing between languages. An
understanding of borrowing is essential. For example, subtle inconsisten-
cies embedded within German, Greek, Celtic, and other languages, in-
cluding such fleeting sounds as the word-initial [kn-] (knob) can be
identified as phonetically uncharacteristic of Indo-European. These frag-
ments from extinct non-Indo-European languages are preserved only be-
cause they were borrowed. They can help us create maps of pre-Indo-European
place-names, like the places ending with [-ssos] or [-nthos] (Corinthos,
Knossos, Parnassos), borrowed into Greek and thought to show the geo-
graphic distribution of the pre-Greek language(s) of the Aegean and west-
ern Anatolia. Borrowed non-Indo-European sounds also were used to
reconstruct some aspects of the long-extinct non-Indo-European lan-
guages of northern and eastern Europe. All that is left of these tongues is
an occasional word or sound in the Indo-European languages that replaced
them. Yet we can still identify their fragments in words borrowed thou-
sands of years ago . 8

Another regular use of borrowing is the study of “areal” features like
Sprachbunds. A Sprachbund is a region where several different languages
are spoken interchangeably in different situations, leading to their exten-
sive borrowing of features. The most famous Sprachbund is in southeastern
Europe, where Albanian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croat, and Greek share many
features, with Greek as the dominant element, probably because of its as-
sociation with the Greek Orthodox Church. Finally, borrowing is an ever-
present factor in any study of “genetic” relatedness. Whenever a linguist
tries to decide whether cognate terms in two daughter languages are

Language and Place 89

inherited from a common source, one alternative that must be excluded is
that one language borrowed the term from the other. Many of the meth-
ods of comparative linguistics depend on the accurate identification of bor-
rowed words, sounds, and morphologies.

When a root of similar sound and similar meaning shows up in widely
separated Indo-European languages (including an ancient language), and
phonological comparison of its forms yields a single ancestral root, that
root term can be assigned with some confidence to the Proto-Indo-
European vocabulary. No single reconstructed root should be used as the
basis for an elaborate theory about Proto-Indo-European culture, but we
do not need to work with single roots; we have clusters of terms with re-
lated meanings. At least fifteen hundred unique Proto-Indo-European
roots have been reconstructed, and many of these unique roots appear in
multiple reconstructed Proto-Indo-European words, so the total count of
reconstructed Proto-Indo-European terms is much greater than fifteen
hundred. Borrowing is a specific problem that affects specific reconstructed
roots, but it does not cancel the usefulness of a reconstructed vocabulary
containing thousands of terms.

The Proto-Indo-European homeland is not a racist myth or a purely
theoretical fantasy. A real language lies behind reconstructed Proto-Indo-
European, just as a real language lies behind any dictionary. And that
language is a guide to the thoughts, concerns, and material culture of real
people who lived in a definite region between about 4500 and 2500 bce.
But where was that region?

Finding the Homeland: Ecology and Environment

Regardless of where they ended up, most investigators of the Indo-
European problem all started out the same way. The first step is to iden-
tify roots in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary referring
to animal and plant species or technologies that existed only in certain
places at particular times. The vocabulary itself should point to a home-
land, at least within broad limits. For example, imagine that you were
asked to identify the home of a group of people based only on the knowl-
edge that a linguist had recorded these words in their normal daily
speech:

steer

calf branding-iron chuck-wagon

stockyard rail-head six-gun

saddle lasso horse

You could identify them fairly confidently as residents of the American
southwest, probably during the late nineteenth or early twentieth centu-
ries {six-gun and the absence of words for trucks, cars, and highways are
the best chronological indicators). They probably were cowboys — or pre-
tending to be. Looking closer, the combination of armadillo , sagebrush,
and cactus would place them in west Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona.

Linguists have long tried to find animal or plant names in the recon-
structed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary referring to species that lived
in just one part of the world. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European
term for salmon, */ok*s, was once famous as definite proof that the “Aryan”
homeland lay in northern Europe. But animal and tree names seem to
narrow and broaden in meaning easily. They are even reused and recycled
when people move to a new environment, as English colonists used robin
for a bird in the Americas that was a different species from the robin of
England. The most specific meaning most linguists would now feel com-
fortable ascribing to the reconstructed term */ok*s- is “trout-like fish.” There
are fish like that in the rivers across much of northern Eurasia, including
the rivers flowing into the Black and Caspian Seas. The reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European root for beech has a similar history Because the cop-
per beech, Fagus silvatica, did not grow east of Poland, the Proto-Indo-
European root *bhago- was once used to support a northern or western
European homeland. But in some Indo-European languages the same
root refers to other tree species (oak or elder), and in any case the common
beech {Fagus orientalis ) grows also in the Caucasus, so its original mean-
ing is unclear. Most linguists at least agree that the fauna and flora desig-
nated by the reconstructed vocabulary are temperate-zone types {birch,
otter, beaver, lynx, bear, horse), not Mediterranean (no cypress, olive, or lau-
rel) and not tropical (no monkey, elephant , palm , or papyrus). The roots for
horse and bee are most helpful.

Bee and honey are very strong reconstructions based on cognates in
most Indo-European languages. A derivative of the term for honey,
*medbu~, was also used for an intoxicating drink, mead, that probably
played a prominent role in Proto-Indo-European rituals. Honeybees
were not native east of the Ural Mountains, in Siberia, because the hard-
wood trees (lime and oak, particularly) that wild honeybees prefer as

Language and Place 91

nesting sites were rare or absent east of the Urals. If bees and honey did
not exist in Siberia, the homeland could not have been there. That re-
moves all of Siberia and much of northeastern Eurasia from contention,
including the Central Asian steppes of Kazakhstan. The horse, *ek*wo-,
is solidly reconstructed and seems also to have been a potent symbol of
divine power for the speakers of Proto-Indo-European. Although horses
lived in small, isolated pockets throughout prehistoric Europe, the Cau-
casus, and Anatolia between 4500 and 2500 BCE, they were rare or
absent in the Near East, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent. They were
numerous and economically important only in the Eurasian steppes. The
term for horse removes the Near East, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent
from serious contention, and encourages us to look closely at the Eur-
asian steppes. This leaves temperate Europe, including the steppes west
of the Urals, and the temperate parts of Anatolia and the Caucasus
Mountains. 9

Finding the Homeland: The Economic and Social Setting

The speakers of Proto-Indo-European were farmers and stockbreeders:
we can reconstruct words for bull, cow, ox, ram, ewe, lamb, pig, and piglet.
They had many terms for milk and dairy foods, including sour milk, whey,
and curds. When they led their cattle and sheep out to the field they
walked with a faithful dog. They knew how to shear wool, which they used
to weave textiles (probably on a horizontal band loom). They tilled the
earth (or they knew people who did) with a scratch-plow, or ard, which
was pulled by oxen wearing a yoke. There are terms for grain and chaff, and
perhaps for furrow. They turned their grain into flour by grinding it with
a hand pestle, and cooked their food in clay pots (the root is actually for
cauldron, but that word in English has been narrowed to refer to a metal
cooking vessel). They divided their possessions into two categories: mov-
ables and immovables; and the root for movable wealth ( *peku- , the ances-
tor of such English words as pecuniary) became the term for herds in
general. 10 Finally, they were not averse to increasing their herds at their
neighbors’ expense, as we can reconstruct verbs that meant “to drive cat-
tle,” used in Celtic, Italic, and Indo-Iranian with the sense of cattle raid-
ing or “rustling.”

What was social life like? The speakers of Proto-Indo-European lived
in a world of tribal politics and social groups united through kinship and
marriage. They lived in households ( *domh ), containing one or more
families Cge'nhjes-) organized into clans {*weik -), which were led by clan

92 Chapter s

leaders, or chiefs ( *weik-potis ). They had no word for city . Households ap-
pear to have been male -centered. Judging from the reconstructed kin
terms, the important named kin were predominantly on the fathers side,
which suggests patrilocal marriages (brides moved into the husband s
household). A group identity above the level of the clan was probably
tribe (*A yerds), a root that developed into Aryan in the Indo-Iranian
branch. 11

The most famous definition of the basic divisions in Proto-Indo-
European society was the tripartite scheme of Georges Dumezil, who
suggested that there was a fundamental three-part division between the
ritual specialist or priest, the warrior, and the ordinary herder/cultiva-
tor. Colors might have been associated with these three roles: white for
the priest, red for the warrior, and black or blue for the herder/cultiva-
tor; and each role might have been assigned a specific type of ritual/le-
gal death: strangulation for the priest, cutting/stabbing for the warrior,
and drowning for the herder/cultivator. A variety of other legal and
ritual distinctions seem to have applied to these three identities. It is
unlikely that Dumezil’s three divisions were groups with a limited
membership. Probably they were something much less defined, like
three age grades through which all males were expected to pass — per-
haps herders (young), warriors (older), and lineage elders/ritual leaders
(oldest), as among the Maasai in east Africa. The warrior category was
regarded with considerable ambivalence, often represented in myth by a
figure who alternated between a protector and a berserk murderer who
killed his own father (Hercules, Indra, Thor). Poets occupied another
respected social category. Spoken words, whether poems or oaths, were
thought to have tremendous power. The poets praise was a mortal’s
only hope for immortality.

The speakers of Proto-Indo-European were tribal farmers and stock-
breeders. Societies like this lived across much of Europe, Anatolia, and
the Caucasus Mountains after 6000 BCE. But regions where hunting and
gathering economies persisted until after 2500 BCE are eliminated as
possible homelands, because Proto-Indo-European was a dead language
by 2500 BCE. The northern temperate forests of Europe and Siberia are
excluded by this stockbreeders-before-2500 BCE rule, which cuts away
one more piece of the map. The Kazakh steppes east of the Ural Moun-
tains are excluded as well. In fact, this rule, combined with the exclusion
of tropical regions and the presence of honeybees, makes a homeland any-
where east of the Ural Mountains unlikely.

Language and Place yj

Finding the Homeland: Uralic and Caucasian Connections

The possible homeland locations can be narrowed further by identifying
the neighbors. The neighbors of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European can
be identified through words and morphologies borrowed between Proto-
Indo-European and other language families. It is a bit risky to discuss
borrowing between reconstructed proto-languages — first, we have to re-
construct a phonological system for each of the proto-languages, then
identify roots of similar form and meaning in both proto-languages, and
finally see if the root in one proto-language meets all the expectations of
a root borrowed from the other. If neighboring proto-languages have the
same roots, reconstructed independently, and one root can be explained as
a predictable outcome of borrowing from the other, then we have a strong
case for borrowing. So who borrowed words from, or loaned words into,
Proto-Indo-European? Which language families exhibit evidence of early
contact and interchange with Proto-Indo-European?

Uralic Contacts

By far the strongest linkages can be seen with Uralic. The Uralic languages
are spoken today in northern Europe and Siberia, with one southern off-
shoot, Magyar, in Hungary, which was conquered by Magyar-speaking
invaders in the tenth century. Uralic, like Indo-European, is a broad lan-
guage family; its daughter languages are spoken across the northern for-
ests of Eurasia from the Pacific shores of northeastern Siberia (Nganasan,
spoken by tundra reindeer herders) to the Atlantic and Baltic coasts (Finn-
ish, Estonian, Saami, Karelian, Vepsian, and Votian). Most linguists di-
vide the family at the root into two super-branches, Finno-Ugric (the
western branch) and Samoyedic (the eastern), although Salminen has ar-
gued that this binary division is based more on tradition than on solid
linguistic evidence. His alternative is a “flat” division of the language fam-
ily into nine branches, with Samoyedic just one of the nine. 12

The homeland of Proto-Uralic probably was in the forest zone centered
on the southern flanks of the Ural Mountains. Many argue for a homeland
west of the Urals and others argue for the east side, but almost all Uralic
linguists and Ural-region archaeologists would agree that Proto-Uralic
was spoken somewhere in the birch-pine forests between the Oka River
on the west (around modern Gorky) and the Irtysh River on the east
(around modern Omsk). Today the Uralic languages spoken in this core

94 Chapter^

region include, from west to east, Mordvin, Mari, Udmurt, Komi, and
Mansi, of which two (Udmurt and Komi) are stems on the same branch
(Permian). Some linguists have proposed homelands located farther east
(the Yenisei River) or farther west (the Baltic), but the evidence for these
extremes has not convinced many. 13

The reconstructed Proto-Uralic vocabulary suggests that its speakers
lived far from the sea in a forest environment. They were foragers who
hunted and fished but possessed no domesticated plants or animals except
the dog. This correlates well with the archaeological evidence. In the region
between the Oka and the Urals, the Lyalovo culture was a center of cul-
tural influences and interchanges among forest-zone forager cultures, with
inter-cultural connections extending from the Baltic to the eastern slopes
of the Urals during approximately the right period, 4500-3000 BCE.

The Uralic languages show evidence of very early contact with Indo-
European languages. How that contact is interpreted is a subject of de-
bate. There are three basic positions. First, the Indo-Uralic hypothesis
suggests that the morphological linkages between the two families are so
deep (shared pronouns), and the kinds of shared vocabulary so fundamen-
tal (words for water and name), that Proto-Indo-European and Proto-
Uralic must have inherited these shared elements from some very ancient
common linguistic parent — perhaps we might call it a “grandmother-
tongue.” The second position, the early loan hypothesis, argues that the
forms of the shared proto-roots for terms like name and water, as recon-
structed in the vocabularies of both Proto-Uralic and Proto-Indo-
European, are much too similar to reflect such an ancient inheritance.
Inherited roots should have undergone sound shifts in each developing
family over a long period, but these roots are so similar that they can only
be explained as loans from one proto-language into the other — and, in all
cases, the loans went from Proto-Indo-European into Proto-Uralic. 14 The
third position, the late loan hypothesis, is the one perhaps encountered
most frequently in the general literature. It claims that there is little or no
convincing evidence for borrowings even as old as the respective proto-
languages; instead, the oldest well-documented loans should be assigned
to contacts between Indo-Iranian and late Proto-Uralic, long after the
Proto-Indo-European period. Contacts with Indo-Iranian could not be
used to locate the Proto-Indo-European homeland.

At a conference dedicated to these subjects held at the University of Hel-
sinki in 1999, not one linguist argued for a strong version of the late-loan
hypothesis. Recent research on the earliest loans has reinforced the case for

Language and Place 95

an early period of contact at least as early as the level of the proto-languages.
Tli is is well reflected in vocabulary loans. Koivulehto discussed at least
thirteen words that are probable loans from Proto-Indo-European (PIE)
into Proto-Uralic (P-U):

1. to give or to sell, P-U *mexe from PIE *h 2 mey-g { ‘to change’, ex-
change’

2. to bring, lead, or draw', P-U *weta - from PIE *wed h -e/o - ‘to lead’,

‘to marry’, ‘to wed’

3. to wash', P-U *mos'ke- from PIE *mozg-eyc/o- ‘to wash’, ‘to sub-
merge’

4. to fear, P-U *pele- from PIE *pe/hf ‘to shake’, ‘cause to tremble’

5. to plait, to spin ; P-U *puna- from PIE *pn.H-e/o- ‘to plait’, ‘to
spin’

6. to walk, wander, go\ P-U *ku/ke - from PIE *k u elH-e/o- ‘it/he/she
walks around’, ‘wanders’

7. to drill, to bore\ P-U *pura- from PIE *bhrH- ‘to bore’, ‘to drill

8. shall, must , to have to\ P-U *kelke- from PIE *skelH - ‘to be guilty’,
‘shall’, ‘must’

9. long thin pole\ P-U *salka- from PIE *g h alg h o- ‘well-pole’, gal-
lows’, ‘long pole’

10. merchandise, price ; P-U *wosa from PIE *wosa ‘merchandise , ‘to
buy’

11. water; P-U *wete from PIE *wed-er/en, ‘water’, ‘river’

12. sinew; P-U *sone from PIE *sneH(u)~ ‘sinew’

13. name', P-U *nime- from PIE 'h/ieh^mn- ‘name’

Another thirty-six words were borrowed from differentiated Indo-
European daughter tongues into early forms of Uralic prior to the emer-
gence of differentiated Indie and Iranian — before 1700—1500 BCE at
the latest. These later words included such terms as bread, dough , beer, to
winnow, and piglet, which might have been borrowed when the speakers
of Uralic languages began to adopt agriculture from neighboring Indo-
European-speaking farmers and herders. But the loans between the
proto-languages are the important ones bearing on the location of the
Proto-Indo-European homeland. And that they are so similar in form
does suggest that they were loans rather than inheritances from some
very ancient common ancestor.

This does not mean that there is no evidence for an older level ol shared
ancestry. Inherited similarities, reflected in shared pronoun forms and

96 Chapter 5

some noun endings, might have been retained from such a common
ancestor. The pronoun and inflection forms shared by Indo-European and
Uralic are the following:

Proto-Uralic

Proto-Indo-European

*te-na

{thou)

*ti (?)

*te

(you)

*ti (clitic dative)

*me-na

(I)

mi

*ta-/to-

(this/that)

*te-/to-

*ke-, ku-

(who, what)

*k w e/o-

*-m

(accusative sing)

*-m

*-n

(genitive plural)

* ~

-om

These parallels suggest that Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic
shared two kinds of linkages. 15 One kind, revealed in pronouns, noun
endings, and shared basic vocabulary, could be ancestral: the two proto-
languages shared some quite ancient common ancestor, perhaps a broadly
related set of intergrading dialects spoken by hunters roaming between
the Carpathians and the Urals at the end of the last Ice Age. The relation-
ship is so remote, however, that it can barely be detected. Johanna Nichols
has called this kind of very deep, apparently genetic grouping a “quasi-
stock.” 16 Joseph Greenberg saw Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic as
particularly close cousins within a broader set of such language stocks that
he called “Eurasiatic.”

The other link between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic seems
cultural: some Proto-Indo-European words were borrowed by the speak-
ers of Proto-Uralic. Although they seem odd words to borrow, the terms to
wash, price y and to give or to sell might have been borrowed through a trade
jargon used between Proto-Uralic and Proto-Indo-European speakers.
These two kinds of linguistic relationship — a possible common ancestral
origin and inter-language borrowings — suggest that the Proto-Indo-
European homeland was situated near the homeland of Proto-Uralic, in
the vicinty of the southern Ural Mountains. We also know that the speak-
ers of Proto-Indo-European were farmers and herders whose language
had disappeared by 2500 BCE. The people living east of the Urals did not
adopt domesticated animals until after 2500 BC. Proto-Indo-European

Language and Place 97

must therefore have been spoken somewhere to the south and west of the
Urals , the only region close to the Urals where farming and herding was
regularly practiced before 2500 BCE.

Caucasian Contacts and the Anatolian Homeland

Proto-Indo-European also had contact with the languages of the Cauca-
sus Mountains, primarily those now classified as South Caucasian or
Kartvelian, the family that produced modern Georgian. These connec-
tions have suggested to some that the Proto-Indo-European homeland
should be placed in the Caucasus near Armenia or perhaps in nearby east-
ern Anatolia. The links between Proto-Indo-European and Kartvelian are
said to appear in both phonetics and vocabulary, although the phonetic
link is controversial. It depends on a brilliant but still problematic revision
of the phonology of Proto-Indo-European proposed by the linguists
T. Gamkrelidze and V. Ivanov, known as the glottalic theory. 17 The glot-
talic theory made Proto-Indo-European phonology sound somewhat sim-
ilar to that of Kartvelian, and even to the Semitic languages (Assyrian,
Hebrew, Arabic) of the ancient Near East. This opened the possibility that
Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Kartvelian, and Proto-Semitic might have
evolved in a region where they shared certain areal phonological features.
But by itself the glottalic phonology cannot prove a homeland in the Cau-
casus, even if it is accepted. And the glottalic phonology still has failed to
convince many Indo-European linguists. 18

Gamkrelidze and Ivanov have also suggested that Proto-Indo-European
contained terms for panther, lion, and elephant, and for southern tree spe-
cies. These animals and trees could be used to exclude a northern home-
land. They also compiled an impressive list of loan words which they said
were borrowed from Proto-Kartvelian and the Semitic languages into
Proto-Indo-European. These relationships suggested to them that Proto-
Indo-European had evolved in a place where it was in close contact with
both the Semitic languages and the languages of the Southern Caucasus.
They suggested Armenia as the most probable Indo-European homeland.
Several archaeologists, prominently Colin Renfrew and Robert Drews,
have followed their general lead, borrowing some of their linguistic argu-
ments but placing the Indo-European homeland a little farther west, in
central or western Anatolia.

But the evidence for a Caucasian or Anatolian homeland is weak. Many
of the terms suggested as loans from Semitic into Proto-Indo-European

y8 Chapter^

have been rejected by other linguists. The few Semitic to-Proto-Indo
European loan words that are widely accepted, words for items like silver
and bull, might be words that were carried along trade and migration
routes far from the Semites’ Near Eastern homeland. Johanna Nichols has
shown from the phonology of the loans that the Proto-Indo-European/
Proto-Kartvelian/Proto-Semitic contacts were indirect — all the loan
words passed through unknown intermediaries between the known three.
One intermediary is required by chronology, as Proto-Kartvelian is gener-
ally thought to have existed after Proto-Indo-European and Proto-
Semitic . 19

The Semitic and Caucasian vocabulary that was borrowed into Proto-
Indo-European through Kartvelian therefore contains roots that belonged
to some Pre-Kartvelian or Proto-Kartvelian language in the Caucasus. This
language had relations, through unrecorded intermediaries, with Proto-
Indo-European on one side and Proto-Semitic on the other. That is not a
particularly close lexical relationship. If Proto-Kartvelian was spoken on
the south side of the North Caucasus Mountain range, as seems likely, it
might have been spoken by people associated with the Early Transcauca-
sian Culture (also known as the Kura-Araxes culture), dated about 3500-
2200 BCE. They could have had indirect relations with the speakers of
Proto-Indo-European through the Maikop culture of the North Caucasus
region. Many experts agree that Proto-Indo-European shared some fea-
tures with a language ancestral to Kartvelian but not necessarily through a
direct face-to-face link. Relations with the speakers of Proto-Uralic were
closer.

So who were the neighbors? Proto-Indo-European exhibits strong links
with Proto-Uralic and weaker links with a language ancestral to Proto-
Kartvelian. The speakers of Proto-Indo-European lived somewhere be-
tween the Caucasus and Ural Mountains but had deeper linguistic
relationships with the people who lived around the Urals.

The Location of the Proto-Indo-European Homeland

The speakers of Proto-Indo-European were tribal farmers who cultivated
grain, herded cattle and sheep, collected honey from honeybees, drove
wagons, made wool or felt textiles, plowed fields at least occasionally or
knew people who did, sacrificed sheep, cattle, and horses to a troublesome
array of sky gods, and fully expected the gods to reciprocate the favor.
These traits guide us to a specific kind of material culture — one with wag-
ons, domesticated sheep and cattle, cultivated grains, and sacrificial de-

Language and Place 99

posits with the bones of sheep, cattle, and horses. We should also look for
a specific kind of ideology. In the reciprocal exchange of gifts and favors
between their patrons, the gods, and human clients, humans offered a
portion of their herds through sacrifice, accompanied by well-crafted
verses of praise; and the gods in return provided protection from disease
and misfortune, and the blessings of power and prosperity. Patron-client
reciprocity of this kind is common among chiefdoms, societies with insti-
tutionalized differences in prestige and power, where some clans or lin-
eages claim a right of patronage over others, usually on grounds of holiness
or historical priority in a given territory.

Knowing that we are looking for a society with a specific list of material
culture items and institutionalized power distinctions is a great help in lo-
cating the Proto-Indo-European homeland. We can exclude all regions
where hunter-gatherer economies survived up to 2500 BCE. That elimi-
nates the northern forest zone of Eurasia and the Kazakh steppes east of
the Ural Mountains. The absence of honeybees east of the Urals eliminates
any part of Siberia. The temperate-zone flora and fauna in the recon-
structed vocabulary, and the absence of shared roots for Mediterranean or
tropical flora and fauna, eliminate the tropics, the Mediterranean, and the
Near East. Proto-Indo-European exhibits some very ancient links with the
Uralic languages, overlaid by more recent lexical borrowings into Proto-
Uralic from Proto-Indo-European; and it exhibits less clear linkages to
some Pre- or Proto-Kartvelian language of the Caucasus region. All these
requirements would be met by a Proto-Indo-European homeland placed
west of the Ural Mountains, between the Urals and the Caucasus, in the
steppes of eastern Ukraine and Russia. The internal coherence of recon-
structed Proto-Indo-European — the absence of evidence for radical inter-
nal variation in grammar and phonology — indicates that the period of
language history it reflects was less than two thousand years, probably less
than one thousand. The heart of the Proto-Indo-European period probably
fell between 4000 and 3000 BCE, with an early phase that might go back
to 4500 BCE and a late phase that ended by 2500 BCE.

What does archaeology tell us about the steppe region between the Cau-
casus and the Urals, north of the Black and Caspian Seas — the Pontic-
Caspian region — during this period? First, archaeology reveals a set of
cultures that fits all the requirements of the reconstructed vocabulary: they
sacrificed domesticated horses, cattle, and sheep, cultivated grain at least
occasionally, drove wagons, and expressed institutionalized status distinc-
tions in their funeral rituals. They occupied a part of the world — the
steppes — where the sky is by far the most striking and magnificent part of

zoo Chapter 5

1000 BCE

Steppe Regions

Key

s' ''n. largely isolated

^ after separation

/w frequent

/WV XVVA

significant borrowing

a** /w occasional but

Wfm end of

significant borrowing

proto-language

Figure 5.2 A diagram of the sequence and approximate dates of splits in early
Indo-European as proposed in this book, with the maximal window for Proto-
Indo-European indicated by the dashed lines. The dates of splits are deter-
mined by archaeological events described in chapters 11 (Anatolian) throughl 6
(Iranian and Indie).

the landscape, a fitting environment for people who believed that all their
most important deities lived in the sky. Archaeological evidence for migra-
tions from this region into neighboring regions, both to the west and to the
east, is well established. The sequence and direction of these movements
matches the sequence and direction suggested by Indo-European linguis-
tics and geography (figure 5.2). The first identifiable migration out of the
Pontic-Caspian steppes was a movement toward the west about 4200-3900
BCE that could represent the detachment of the Pre-Anatolian branch, at
a time before wheeled vehicles were introduced to the steppes (see chapter

■

maximal PIE period

Language and Place 101

4). This was followed by a movement toward the east (about 3700-3300
BCE) that could represent the detachment of the Tocharian branch. The
next visible migration out of the steppes flowed toward the west. Its earliest
phase might have separated the Pre-Germanic branch, and its later, more
visible phase detached the Pre-Italic and Pre-Celtic dialects. This was fol-
lowed by movements to the north and east that probably established the
Baltic-Slavic and Indo-Iranian tongues. The remarkable match between
the archaeologically documented pattern of movements out of the steppes
and that expected from linguistics is fascinating, but it has absorbed, for
too long, most of the attention and debate that is directed at the archaeol-
ogy of Indo-European origins. Archaeology also adds substantially to our
cultural and economic understanding of the speakers of Proto-Indo-
European. Once the homeland has been located with linguistic evidence,
the archaeology of that region provides a wholly new kind of information,
a new window onto the lives of the people who spoke Proto-Indo-European
and the process by which it became established and began to spread.

Before we step into the archaeology, however, we should pause and
think for a moment about the gap we are stepping across, the void between
linguistics and archaeology, a chasm most Western archaeologists feel
cannot be crossed. Many would say that language and material culture are
completely unrelated, or are related in such changeable and complicated
ways that it is impossible to use material culture to identify language
groups or boundaries. If that is true, then even if we can identify the place
and time of the Indo-European homeland using the reconstructed vocab-
ulary, the link to archaeology is impossible. We cannot expect any correla-
tion with material culture. But is such pessimism warranted? Is there no
predictable, regular link between language and material culture?

Chapter Six

The Archaeology of Language

A language homeland implies a bounded space of some kind. How can
we define those boundaries? Can ancient linguistic frontiers be identified
through archaeology?

Let us first define our terms. It would be helpful if anthropologists used
the same vocabulary used in geography. According to geographers, the
word border is neutral — it has no special or restricted meaning. A frontier
is a specific kind of border — a transitional zone with some depth, porous
to cross-border movement, and very possibly dynamic and moving. A
frontier can be cultural, like the Western frontier of European settlement
in North America, or ecological. An ecotone is an ecological frontier. Some
ecotoncs are very subtle and small-scale — there are dozens of tiny eco-
tones in any suburban yard — and others are very large-scale, like the bor-
der between steppe and forest running east-west across central Eurasia.
Finally, a sharply defined border that limits movement in some way is a
boundary, for example, the political borders of modern nations are bound-
aries. But nation-like political and linguistic boundaries were unknown in
the Pontic-Caspian region between 4500 and 2500 BCE. The cultures we
are interested in were tribal societies. 1

Archaeologists’ interpretations of premodern tribal borders have changed
in the last forty years. Most pre-state tribal borders are now thought to
have been porous and dynamic — frontiers, not boundaries. More impor-
tant, most are thought to have been ephemeral. The tribes Europeans en-
countered in their colonial ventures in Africa, South Asia, the Pacific, and
the Americas were at first assumed to have existed for a long time. They
often claimed antiquity for themselves. But many tribes are now believed
to have been transient political communities of the historical moment.
Like the Ojibwa, some might have crystallized only after contact with Eu-
ropean agents who wanted to deal with bounded groups to facilitate the
negotiation of territorial treaties. And the same critical attitude toward

Archaeology of Language ioj

bounded tribal territories is applied to European history. Ancient Euro-
pean tribal identities — Celt, Scythian, Cimbri, Teuton, and Piet — are
now frequently seen as convenient names for chameleon-like political alli-
ances that had no true ethnic identity, or as brief ethnic phenomena that
were unable to persist for any length of time, or even as entirely imaginary
later inventions. 2

Pre-state language borders are thought to have been equally fluid, char-
acterized by intergrading local dialects rather than sharp boundaries.
Where language and material culture styles (house type, town type, econ-
omy, dress, etc.) did coincide geographically to create a tribal ethnolin-
guistic frontier, we should expect it to have been short-lived. Language
and material culture can change at different speeds for different reasons,
and so are thought to grow apart easily. Historians and sociologists from
Eric Hobsbawm to Anthony Giddens have proposed that there were no
really distinct and stable ethnolinguistic borders in Europe until the late
eighteenth century, when the French Revolution ushered in the era of
nation-states. In this view of the past only the state is accorded both the
need and the power to warp ethnolinguistic identity into a stable and per-
sistent phenomenon, like the state itself. So how can we hope to identify
ephemeral language frontiers in 3500 BCE? Did they even exist long
enough to be visible archaeologically? 3

Unfortunately this problem is compounded by the shortcomings of ar-
chaeological methods. Most archaeologists would agree that we do not
really know how to recognize tribal ethnolinguistic frontiers, even if they
were stable. Pottery styles were often assumed by pre-World War II ar-
chaeologists to be an indicator of social identity. But we now know that no
simple connection exists between pottery types and ethnicity; as noted in
chapter 1, every modern archaeology student knows that “pots are not
people.” The same problem applies to other kinds of material culture.
Arrow-point types did seem to correlate with language families among
the San hunter-gatherers of South Africa; however, among the Contact-
period Native Americans in the northeastern U.S., the “Madison”-type
arrow point was used by both Iroquoian and Algonkian speakers — its
distribution had no connection to language. Almost any object could have
been used to signal linguistic identity, or not. Archaeologists have there-
fore rejected the possibility that language and material culture are corre-
lated in any predictable or recognizable way. 4

But it seems that language and material culture are related in at least two
ways. One is that tribal languages are generally more numerous in any
long-settled region than tribal material cultures. Silver and Miller noticed,

io4 Chapter 6

in 1997, that most tribal regions had more languages than material cul-
tures. The Washo and Shoshone in the Great Basin had very different lan-
guages, of distinct language families, but similar material cultures; the
Pueblo Indians had more languages than material cultures; the California
Indians had more languages than stylistic groups; and the Indians of the
central Amazon are well known for their amazing linguistic variety and
broadly similar material cultures. A Chicago Field Museum study of lan-
guage and material culture in northern New Guineau, the most detailed
of its type, confirmed that regions defined by material culture were criss-
crossed with numerous materially invisible language borders. 5 But the op-
posite pattern seems to be rare: a homogeneous tribal language is rarely
separated into two very distinct bundles of material culture. This regularity
seems discouraging, as it guarantees that many prehistoric language bor-
ders must be archaeologically invisible, but it does help to decide such ques-
tions as whether one language could have covered all the varied material
culture groups of Copper Age Europe (probably not; see chapter 4).

The second regularity is more important: language is correlated with
material culture at very long-lasting, distinct material-culture borders.

Persistent Frontiers

Persistent cultural frontiers have been ignored, because, I believe, they
were dismissed on theoretical grounds. 6 They are not supposed to be
there, since pre-state tribal borders are interpreted today as ephemeral
and unstable. But archaeologists have documented a number of remark-
ably long-lasting, prehistoric, material-culture frontiers in settings that
must have been tribal. A robust, persistent frontier separated Iroquoian
and Algonkian speakers along the Hudson Valley, who displayed differ-
ent styles of smoking pipes, subtle variations in ceramics, quite divergent
house and settlement types, diverse economies, and very different lan-
guages for at least three centuries prior to European contact. Similarly
the Linear Pottery/Lengyel farmers created a robust material-culture
frontier between themselves and the indigenous foragers in northern
Neolithic Europe, a moving border that persisted for at least a thousand
years; the Cri^/Tripolye cultures were utterly different from the Dnieper-
Donets culture on a moving frontier between the Dniester and Dnieper
Rivers in Ukraine for twenty-five hundred years during the Neolithic
and Eneolithic; and the Jastorf and Halstatt cultures maintained distinct
identities for centuries on either side of the lower Rhine in the Iron Age. 7
In each of these cases cultural norms changed; house designs, decorative

A rchaeology of Language /oj

aesthetics, and religious rituals were not frozen in a single form on either
side. It was the persistent opposition of bundles of customs that defined the
frontier rather than any one artifact type.

Persistent frontiers need not be stable geographically — they can move,
as the Romano-Celt/Anglo-Saxon material-culture frontier moved across
Britain between 400 and 700 CE, or the Linear Pottery/forager frontier
moved across northern Europe between 5400 and 5000 BCE. Some
material-culture frontiers, described in the next chapters, survived for
millennia, in a pre-state social world governed just by tribal politics — no
border guards, no national press. Particularly clear examples defined the
edges of the Pontic-Caspian steppes on the west (Tripolye/Dnieper), on
the north (Russian forest forager/steppe herder), and on the east (Volga-
Ural steppe herder/Kazakh steppe forager). These were the borders of the
region that probably was the homeland of Proto-Indo-European. If an-
cient ethnicities were ephemeral and the borders between them short-
lived, how do we understand premodern tribal material-culture frontiers
that persisted for thousands of years? And can language be connected to
them?

I think the answer is yes. Language is strongly associated with persistent
material-culture frontiers that are defined by bundles of opposed customs,
what I will call robust frontiers. 8 The migrations and frontier formation pro-
cesses that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire in western Europe
provide the best setting to examine this association, because documents and
place-names establish the linguistic identity of the migrants, the locations of
newly formed frontiers, and their persistence over many centuries in politi-
cal contexts where centralized state governments were weak or nonexistent.
For example, the cultural frontier between the Welsh (Celtic branch) and
the English (Germanic branch) has persisted since the Anglo-Saxon con-
quest of Romano-Celtic Britain during the sixth century. Additional con-
quests by Norman-English feudal barons after 1277 pushed the frontier
back to the landsker ; a named and overtly recognized ethnolinguistic fron-
tier between Celtic Welsh-speaking and Germanic English-speaking pop-
ulations that persisted to the present day. They spoke different languages
(Welsh/English), built different kinds of churches (Celtic/Norman En-
glish), managed agriculture differently and with different tools, used diverse
systems of land measurement, employed dissimilar standards of justice, and
maintained a wide variety of distinctions in dress, food, and custom. For
many centuries men rarely married across this border, maintaining a genetic
difference between modern Welsh and English men (but not women) in
traits located on the male Y chromosome.

io6 Chapter 6

Other post-Roman ethnolinguistic frontiers followed the same pattern.
After the fall of Rome German speakers moved into the northern cantons of
Switzerland, and the Gallic kingdom of Burgundy occupied what had been
Gallo-Roman western Switzerland. The frontier between them still sepa-
rates ecologically similar regions within a single modern state that differ in
language (German-French), religion (Protestant-Catholic), architecture, the
size and organization of landholdings, and the nature of the agricultural
economy. Another post-Roman migration created the Breton/French fron-
tier across the base of the peninsula of Brittany, after Romano-Celts mi-
grated to Brittany from western Britain around 400-600 CE, fleeing the
Anglo-Saxons. For more than fifteen hundred years the Celtic-speaking
Bretons have remained distinct from their French-speaking neighbors in
rituals, dress, music, and cuisine. Finally, migrations around 900-1000 CE
brought German speakers into what is now northeastern Italy, where the
persistent frontier between Germans and Romance speakers inside Italy
was studied by Eric Wolf and John Cole in the 1960s. Although in this
case both cultures were Catholic Christians, after a thousand years they
still maintained different languages, house types, settlement organiza-
tions, land tenure and inheritance systems, attitudes toward authority and
cooperation, and quite unfavorable stereotypes of each other. In all these
cases documents and inscriptions show that the ethnolinguistic opposi-
tions were not recent or invented but deeply historical and persistent. 9

These examples suggest that most persistent, robust material-culture
frontiers were ethnolinguistic. Robust, persistent, material-culture fron-
tiers are not found everywhere, so only exceptional language frontiers can
be identified. But that, of course, is better than nothing.

Population Movement across Persistent Frontiers

Unlike the men of Wales and England, most people moved back and forth
across persistent frontiers easily. A most interesting fact about stable eth-
nolinguistic frontiers is that they were not necessarily biological; they
persisted for an extraordinarily long time despite people regularly moving
across them. As Warren DeBoer described in his study of native pottery
styles in the western Amazon basin, “ethnic boundaries in the Ucayali
basin are highly permeable with respect to bodies, but almost inviolable
with respect to style.” 10 The back-and-forth movement of people is indeed
the principal focus of most contemporary borderland studies. The persis-
tence of the borders themselves has remained understudied, probably
because modern nation-states insist that all borders are permanent and

A rchaeology of Lan guage ioj

inviolable, and many nation-states, in an attempt to naturalize their bor-
ders, have tried to argue that they have persisted from ancient times. An-
thropologists and historians alike dismiss this as a fiction; the borders I
have discussed frequently persist within modern nation-states rather than
corresponding to their modern boundaries. But I think we have failed to
recognize that we have internalized the modern nation-state’s basic prem-
ise by insisting that ethnic borders must be inviolable boundaries or they
did not really exist.

If people move across an ethno-linguistic frontier freely, then the fron-
tier is often described in anthropology as, in some sense, a fiction. Is this
just because it was not a boundary like that of a modern nation ? Eric Wolf
used this very argument to assert that the North American Iroquois did
not exist as a distinct tribe during the Colonial period; he called them a
multiethnic trading company. Why? Because their communities were full
of captured and adopted non-Iroquois. But if biology is independent of
language and culture, then the simple movement of Delaware and Nanti-
coke bodies into Iroquoian towns should not imply a dilution of Iroquoian
culture . What matters is how the immigrants acted. Iroquoian adoptees
were required to behave as Iroquois or they might be killed. The Iroquoian
cultural identity remained distinct, and it was long established and persis-
tent. The idea that European nation-states created the Iroquois “nation” in
their own European image is particularly ironic in view of the fact that the
five nations or tribes of the pre-European Northern Iroquois can be traced
back archaeologically in their traditional five tribal territories to 1300 CE,
more than 250 years before European contact. An Iroquois might argue
that the borders of the original five nations of the Northern Iroquois were
demonstrably older than those of many European nation-states at the end
of the sixteenth century. 11

Language frontiers in Europe are not generally strongly correlated
with genetic frontiers; people mated across them. But persistent ethno-
linguistic frontiers probably did originate in places where relatively few
people moved between neighboring mating and migration networks. Di-
alect borders usually are correlated with borders between socioeconomic
u functional zones,” as linguists call a region marked by a strong network
of intra-migration and socioeconomic interdependence. (Cities usually
are divided into several distinct socioeconomic-linguistic functional zones.)
Labov, for example, showed that dialect borders in central Pennsylvania
correlated with reduced cross-border traffic flow densities at the borders
of functional zones. In some places, like the Welsh/English border, the
cross-border flow of people was low enough to appear genetically as a

108 Chapter 6

contrast in gene pools, but at other persistent frontiers there was enough
cross-border movement to blur genetic differences. What, then, main-
tained the frontier itself, the persistent sense of difference? 12

Persistent, robust premodern ethnolinguistic frontiers seem to have sur-
vived for long periods under one or both of two conditions: at large-scale
ecotones (forest/steppe, desert/savannah, mountain/river bottom, mountain/
coast) and at places where long-distance migrants stopped migrating and
formed a cultural frontier (England/Wales, Britanny/France, German Swiss/
French Swiss). Persistent identity depended partly on the continuous con-
frontation with Others that was inherent in these kinds of borders, as
Frederik Barth observed, but it also relied on a home culture behind the
border, a font of imagined tradition that could continuously feed those
contrasts, as Eric Wolf recognized in Italy. 13 Let us briefly examine how
these factors worked together to create and maintain persistent frontiers.
We begin with borders created by long-distance migration.

Migration as a Cause of Persistent
Material-Culture Frontiers

During the 1970s and 1980s the very idea of folk migrations was avoided by
Western archaeologists. Folk migrations seemed to represent the boiled-
down essence of the discredited idea that ethnicity, language, and material
culture were packaged into neatly bounded societies that careened across
the landscape like self-contained billiard balls, in a famously dismissive sim-
ile. Internal causes of social change — shifts in production and the means of
production, in climate, in economy, in access to wealth and prestige, in po-
litical structure, and in spiritual beliefs — all got a good long look by archae-
ologists during these decades. While archaeologists were ignoring migration,
modern demographers became very good at picking apart the various
causes, recruiting patterns, flow dynamics, and targets of modern migra-
tion streams. Migration models moved far beyond the billiard ball analogy.
The acceptance of modern migration models in the archaeology of the U.S.
Southwest and in Iroquoian archaeology in the Northeast during the 1990s
added new texture to the interpretation of Anasazi/Pueblo and Iroquoian
societies, but in most other parts of the world the archaeological database
was simply not detailed enough to test the very specific behavioral predic-
tions of modern migration theories. 14 History, on the other hand, contains a
very detailed record of the past, and among modern historians migration is
accepted as a cause of persistent cultural frontiers.

Archaeology of Language iog

The colonization of North America by English speakers is one promi-
nent example of a well-studied, historical connection between migration
and ethnolinguistic frontier formation. Decades of historical research have
shown, surprisingly, that while the borders separating Europeans and
Native Americans were important, those that separated different British
cultures were just as significant. Eastern North America was colonized by
four distinct migration streams that originated in four different parts of
the British Isles. When they touched down in eastern North America,
they created four clearly bounded ethnolinguistic regions between about
1620 and 1750. The Yankee dialect was spoken in New England. The
same region also had a distinctive form of domestic architecture — the
salt-box clapboard house — as well as its own barn and church architec-
ture, a distinctive town type (houses clustered around a common grazing
green), a peculiar cuisine (often baked, like Boston baked beans), distinct
fashions in clothing, a famous style of gravestones, and a fiercely legalistic
approach to politics and power. The geographic boundaries of the New
England folk-culture region, drawn by folklorists on the basis of these
traits, and the Yankee dialect region, drawn by linguists, coincide almost
exactly. The Yankee dialect was a variant of the dialect of East Anglia, the
region from which most of the early Pilgrim migrants came; and New En-
gland folk culture was a simplified version of East Anglian folk culture.
The other three regions also exhibited strongly correlated dialects and folk
cultures, as defined by houses, barn types, fence types, the frequency of
towns and their organization, food preferences, clothing styles, and reli-
gion. One was the mid-Atlantic region (Pennsylvania Quakers from the
English Midlands), the third was the Virginia coast (Royalist Anglican
tobacco planters from southern England, largely Somerset and Wessex),
and the last was the interior Appalachians (borderlanders from the Scotch-
Irish borders). Both dialect and folk culture are traceable in each case to a
particular region in the British Isles from which the first effective Euro-
pean settlers came. 15

The four ethnolinguistic regions of Colonial eastern North America
were created by four separate migration streams that imported people with
distinctive ethnolinguistic identities into four different regions where sim-
plified versions of their original linguistic and material differences were
established, elaborated, and persisted for centuries (table 6.1). In some
ways, including modern presidential voting patterns, the remnants of these
four regions survive even today. But can modern migration patterns be ap-
plied to the past, or do modern migrations have purely modern causes?

iio Chapter 6

Table 6.1

Migration Streams to Colonial North America

Colonial Region Source Region

New England East Anglia/Kent Puritan

Mid-Atlantic English Midlandss/ Quaker/German

Southern Germany Protestant

Tidewater Virginia-Carolina Somerset/Wessex Anglican

Southern Appalachian Scots-Irish borderlands Calvinist/Celtic church

The Causes of Migration

Many archaeologists think that modern migrations are fueled principally
by overpopulation and the peculiar boundaries of modern nation-states,
neither of which affected the prehistoric world, making modern migration
studies largely irrelevant to prehistoric societies. 16 But migrations have
many causes besides overpopulation within state borders. People do not
migrate, even in today’s crowded world, simply because there are too many
at home. Crowding would be called a “push” factor by modern demogra-
phers, a negative condition at home. But there are other kinds of push
factors— war, disease, crop failure, climate change, institutionalized raid-
ing for loot, high bride-prices, the laws of primogeniture, religious intol-
erance, banishment, humiliation, or simple annoyance with the neighbors.
Many causes of today’s migrations and those in the past were social, not
demographic. In ancient Rome, feudal Europe, and many parts ot modern
Africa, inheritance rules favored older siblings, condemning the younger
ones to find their own lands or clients, a strong motive for them to mi-
grate. 17 Pushes could be even more subtle. The persistent outward migra-
tions and conquests of the pre-Colonial East African Nuer were caused,
according to Raymond Kelley, not by overpopulation within Nuerland but
rather by a cultural system of bride-price regulations that made it very ex-
pensive for young Nuer men to obtain a socially desirable bride. A bride
price was a payment made by the groom to the bride s family to compensate
for the loss of her labor. Escalation in bride-prices encouraged Nuer men
to raid their non-Nuer neighbors for cattle (and pastures to support them) that
could be used to pay the elevated bride-price for a high-status marriage. Tribal
status rivalries supported by high brideprices in an arid, low-productivity

Archaeology of Language

iii

environment led to out-migration and the rapid territorial expansion of
the Nuer. 18 Grassland migrations among tribal pastoralists can be “pushed”
by many things other than absolute resource shortages.

Regardless of how “pushes” are defined, no migration can be adequately
explained by “pushes” alone. Every migration is affected as well by “pull”
factors (the alleged attractions of the destination, regardless of whether
they are true), by communication networks that bring information to po-
tential migrants, and by transport costs. Changes in any of these factors
will raise or lower the threshold at which migration becomes an attractive
option. Migrants weigh these dynamics, for far from being an instinctive
response to overcrowding, migration is often a conscious social strategy meant
to improve the migrants position in competition for status and riches. If
possible, migrants recruit clients and followers among the people at home,
convincing them also to migrate, as Julius Caesar described the recruit-
ment speeches of the chiefs of the Helvetii prior to their migration from
Switzerland into Gaul. Recruitment in the homeland by potential and al-
ready departed migrants has been a continuous pattern in the expansion
and reproduction of West African clans and lineages, as Igor Kopytoff
noted. There is every reason to believe that similar social calculations have
inspired migrations since humans evolved.

Effects: The Archaeological Identification of Ancient Migrations

Large, sustained migrations, particularly those that moved a long distance
from one cultural setting into a very different one, or folk migrations , can
be identified archaeologically. Emile Haury knew most of what to look for
already in his excavations in Arizona in the 1950s: (1) the sudden appear-
ance of a new material culture that has no local antecedents or prototypes;
(2) a simultaneous shift in skeletal types (biology); (3) a neighboring terri-
tory where the intrusive culture evolved earlier; and (4) (a sign not recog-
nized by Haury) the introduction of new ways of making things, new
technological styles, which we now know are more “fundamental” (like
the core vocabulary in linguistics) than decorative styles.

Smaller-scale migrations by specialists, mercenaries, skilled craft work-
ers, and so on, are more difficult to identify. This is partly because archae-
ologists have generally stopped with the four simple criteria just described
and neglected to analyze the internal workings even of folk migrations. To
really understand why and how folk migrations occurred, and to have any
hope of identifying small-scale migrations, archaeologists have to study the
internal structure of long-distance migration streams, both large and small.

ij2 Chapter 6

The organization of migrating groups depends on the identity and social
connections of the scouts (who select the target destination); the social or-
ganization of information sharing (which determines who gets access to
the scouts information); transportation technology (cheaper and more ef-
fective transport makes migration easier); the targeting of destinations
(whether they are many or few); the identity of the first effective settlers
(also called the “charter group”); return migration (most migrations have a
counterflow going back home); and changes in the goals and identities of
migrants who join the stream later. If we look for all these factors we can
better understand why and how migrations happened. Sustained migra
tions, particularly by pioneers looking to settle in new homes, can create
very long-lasting, persistent ethnolinguistic frontiers.

The Simplification of Dialect and Culture
among Long-distance Migrants

Access to the scouts information defines the pool of potential migrants.
Studies have found that the first 10% of new migrants into a region is an
accurate predictor of the social makeup of the population that will follow
them. This restriction on information at the source produces two common
behaviors: leapfrogging and chain migration. In leapfrogging, migrants go
only to those places about which they have heard good things, skipping
over other possible destinations, sometimes moving long distances in one
leap. In chain migration, migrants follow kin and co-residents to familiar
places with social support, not to the objectively “best” place. They jump
to places where they can rely on people they know, from point to targeted
point. Recruitment usually is relatively restricted, and this is clearly audi-
ble in their speech.

Colonist speech generally is more homogeneous than the language of
the homeland they left behind. Dialectical differences were fewer among
Colonial-era English speakers in North America than they were in the
British Isles. The Spanish dialects of Colonial South America were more
homogeneous than the dialects of Southern Spain, the home region of
most of the original colonists. Linguistic simplification has three causes.
One is chain migration, where colonists tend to recruit family and friends
from the same places and social groups that the colonists came from.
Simplification also is a normal linguistic outcome of mixing between dia
lects in a contact situation at the destination. 19 Finally, simplification is
encouraged among long-distance migrants by the social influence of the
charter group.

Archaeology of Language iij

The first group to establish a viable social system in a new place is called
the charter group, or the first effective settlers. 20 They generally get the best
land. They might claim rights to perform the highest-status rituals, as
among the Maya of Central America or the Pueblo Indians of the Ameri-
can Southwest. In some cases, for example, Puritan New England, their
councils choose who is permitted to join them. Among Hispanic migrants
in the U.S. Southwest, charter groups were called apex families because of
their structural position in local prestige hierarchies. Many later migrants
were indebted to or dependent on the charter group, whose dialect and
material culture provided the cultural capital for a new group identity.
Charter groups leave an inordinate cultural imprint on later generations,
as the latter copy the charter groups behavior, at least publicly. This ex-
plains why the English language, English house forms, and English set-
tlement types were retained in nineteenth-century Ohio, although the
overwhelming majority of later immigrants was German. The charter
group, already established when the Germans arrived, was English. It also
explains why East Anglian English traits, typical of the earliest Puritan
immigrants, continued to typify New England dialectical speech and do-
mestic architecture long after the majority of later immigrants arrived
from other parts of England or Ireland. As a font of tradition and success
in a new land, the charter group exercised a kind of historical cultural
hegemony over later generations. Their genes, however, could easily be
swamped by later migrants, which is why it is often futile to pursue a gene-
tic fingerprint associated with a particular language.

The combination of chain migration, which restricted the pool of po-
tential migrants at home, and the influence of the charter group, which
encouraged conformity at the destination, produced a leveling of differ-
ences among many colonists. Simplification (fewer variants than in the
home region) and leveling (the tendency toward a standardized form) af-
fected both dialect and material culture. In material culture, domestic ar-
chitecture and settlement organization — the external form and construction
of the house and the layout of the settlement — particularly tended toward
standardization, as these were the most visible signals of identity in any
social landscape. 21 Those who wished to declare their membership in the
mainstream culture adopted its external domestic forms, whereas those
who retained their old house and barn styles (as did some Germans in
Ohio) became political, as well as architectural and linguistic, minorities.
Linguistic and cultural homogeneity among long-distance migrants fa-
cilitated stereotyping by Others, and strengthened the illusion of shared
interests and origins among the migrants.

ii4 Chapter 6

Ecological Frontiers: Different Ways of Making a Living

Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, found that the borders
of American Indian tribes rarely correlated with geographic borders. Boas
decided to study the diffusion of cultural ideas and customs across borders.
But a certain amount of agreement between ecology and culture is not at all
surprising, particularly among people who were farmers and animal herd-
ers, which Boas’s North American tribes generally were not. The length of
the frost-free growing season, precipitation, soil lertility, and topography
affect many aspects of daily life and custom among farmers: herding svs
terns, crop cultivation, house types, the size and arrangement of settle-
ments, favorite foods, sacred foods, the size of food surpluses, and the
timing and richness of public feasts. At large-scale ecotones these basic
differences in economic organization, diet, and social life can blossom into
oppositional ethnic identities, which sometimes are complementary and
mutually supportive, sometimes are hostile, and often are both. Frederick
Barth, after working among the societies of Iran and Afghanistan, was
among the first anthropologists to argue that ethnic identity was continu-
ously created, even invented, at frontiers, rather than residing in the genes
or being passively inherited from the ancestors. Oppositional politics crys-
tallize who we are not, even if we are uncertain who we are , and therefore
play a large role in the definition of ethnic identities. Ecotones were places
where contrasting identities were likely to be reproduced and maintained
for long periods because of structural differences in how politics and eco-
nomics were played. 22

Ecotones coincide with ethnolinguistic frontiers at many places. In
France the Mediterranean provinces of the South and the Atlantic prov-
inces of the North have been divided by an ethnolinguistic border for at
least eight hundred years; the earliest written reference to it dates to 1284.
The flat, tiled roofs of the South sheltered people who spoke the langue
d'oc , whereas the steeply pitched roofs of the North were home to people
who spoke the langue d'oil. They had different cropping systems, and dif-
ferent legal systems as well until they were forced to conform to a national
legal standard. In Kenya the Nilotic-speaking pastoralist Maasai main-
tained a purely cattle-herding economy (or at least that was their ideal) in
the dry plains and plateaus, whereas Bantu-speaking farmers occupied
moister environments on the forested slopes of the mountains or in low
wetlands. Probably the most famous anthropological example of this type
was described by Sir Edmund Leach in his classic Political Systems oj High

Archaeology of Language //j

land Burma. The upland Kachin forest farmers, who lived in the hills of
Burma (Myanmar), were distinct linguistically, and also in many aspects
of ritual and material culture, from the Thai-speaking Shan paddy farmers
who occupied the rich bottomlands in the river valleys. Some Kachin lead-
ers adopted Shan identities on certain occasions, moving back and forth
between the two systems. But the broader distinction between the two
cultures, Kachin and Shan, persisted, a distinction rooted in different
ecologies, for example, the contrasting reliability and predictability of crop
surpluses, the resulting different potentials for surplus wealth, and the dis-
similar social organizations required for upland forest and lowland paddy
farming. Cultural frontiers rooted in ecological differences could survive
for a long time, even with people regularly moving across them. 23

Language Distributions and Ecotones

Why do some language frontiers follow ecological borders? Does language
just ride on the coattails of economy? Or is there an independent relation-
ship between ecology and the way people speak? The linguists Daniel Nettle
at Oxford University and Jane Hill at the University of Arizona proposed, in
1996 (independently, or at least without citing each other), that the geogra-
phy of language reflects an underlying ecology of social relationships. 24

Social ties require a lot of effort to establish and maintain, especially
across long distances, and people are unlikely to expend all that energy un-
less they think they need to. People who are self-sufficient and fairly sure of
their economic future tend to maintain strong social ties with a small num-
ber of people, usually people very much like themselves. Jane Hill calls this
a localist strategy. Their own language, the one they grew up with, gets
them everything they need, and so they tend to speak only that language —
and often only one dialect of that language. (Most college-educated North
Americans fit nicely in this category.) Secure people like this tend to live in
places with productive natural ecologies or at least secure access to pockets
of high productivity. Nettles showed that the average size of language
groups in West Africa is inversely correlated with agricultural productivity:
the richer and more productive the farmland, the smaller the language ter-
ritory. This is one reason why a single pan-European Proto-Indo-European
language during the Neolithic is so improbable.

But people who are moderately uncertain of their economic future, who
live in less-productive territories and have to rely on multiple sources of
income (like the Kachin in Burma or most middle-class families with two
income earners), maintain numerous weak ties with a wider variety of

n6 Chapter 6

people. They often learn two or more languages or dialects, because they
need a wider network to feel secure. They pick up new linguistic habits
very rapidly; they are innovators. In Jane Hill’s study of the Papago Indi-
ans in Arizona, she found that communities living in rich, productive en-
vironments adopted a “localist” strategy in both their language and social
relations. They spoke just one homogeneous, small-territory Papago dia-
lect. But communities living in more arid environments knew many dif-
ferent dialects, and combined them in a variety of nonstandard ways. They
adopted a “distributed” strategy, one that distributed alliances of various
kinds, linguistic and economic, across a varied social and ecological ter-
rain. She proposed that arid, uncertain environments were natural “spread
zones,” where new languages and dialects would spread quickly between
communities that relied on diverse social ties and readily picked up new
dialects from an assortment of people. The Eurasian steppes had earlier
been described by the linguist Johanna Nichols as the prototypical lin-
guistic spread zone; Hill explained why. Thus the association between
language and ecological frontiers is not a case of language passively fol-
lowing culture; instead, there are independent socio-linguistic reasons
why language frontiers tend to break along ecological frontiers.

Summary: Ecotones and Persistent Ethnolinguistic Frontiers

Language frontiers did not universally coincide with ecological frontiers
or natural geographic barriers, even in the tribal world, because migration
and all the other forms of language expansion prevented that. But the
heterogeneity of languages — the number of languages per 1,000 km 2
certainly was affected by ecology. Where an ecological frontier separated a
predictable and productive environment from one that was unpredictable
and unproductive, societies could not be organized the same way on both
sides. Localized languages and small language territories were found
among settled farmers in ecologically productive territories. More variable
languages, fuzzier dialect boundaries, and larger language territories ap
peared among mobile hunter-gatherers and pastoralists occupying territo-
ries where farming was difficult or impossible. In the Eurasian steppes the
ecological frontier between the steppe (unproductive, unpredictable, oc-
cupied principally by hunters or herders) and the neighboring agricultural
lands (extremely productive and reliable, occupied by rich farmers) was a
linguistic frontier through recorded history. Its persistence was one of the
guiding factors in the history of China at one end of the steppes and of
eastern Europe at the other. 26

Archaeology of Language iij

Small-scale Migrations, Elite Recruitment,
and Language Shift

Persistent ecological and migration-related frontiers surrounded the Proto-
Indo-European homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppes. But the spread of
the Indo-European languages beyond that homeland probably did not hap-
pen principally through chain-type folk migrations. A folk movement is
not required to establish a new language in a strange land. Language
change flows in the direction of accents that are admired and emulated by
large numbers of people. Ritual and political elites often introduce and pop-
ularize new ways of speaking. Small elite groups can encourage widespread
language shift toward their language, even in tribal contexts, in places
where they succeed at introducing a new religion or political ideology or
both while taking control of key territories and trade commodities. An
ethnohistorical study of such a case in Africa among the Acholi Illustrates
how the introduction of a new ideology and control over trade can result in
language spread even where the initial migrants were few in number. 27

The Acholi are an ethnolinguistic group in northern Uganda and south-
ern Sudan. They speak Luo, a Western Nilotic language. In about 1675,
when Luo-speaking chiefs first migrated into northern Uganda from the
south, the overwhelming majority of people living in the area spoke Cen-
tral Sudanic or Eastern Nilotic languages — Luo was very much a minority
language. But the Luo chiefs imported symbols and regalia of royalty
(drums, stools) that they had adopted from Bantu kingdoms to the south.
They also imported a new ideology of chiefly religious power, accompa-
nied by demands for tribute service. Between about 1675 and 1725 thir-
teen new chiefdoms were formed, none larger than five villages. In these
islands of chiefly authority the Luo-speaking chiefs recruited clients from
among the lineage elders of the egalitarian local populations, offering
them positions of prestige in the new hierarchy. Their numbers grew
through marriage alliances with the locals, displays of wealth and gener-
osity, assistance for local families in difficulty, threats of violence, and,
most important, control over the inter-regional trade in iron prestige ob-
jects used to pay bride-prices. The Luo language spread slowly through
recruitment. 28 Then an external stress, a severe drought beginning in
1790-1800, affected the region. One ecologically favored Lou chiefdom —
an old one, founded by one of the first Luo charter groups — rose to para-
mount status as its wealth was maintained through the crisis. The Luo
language then spread rapidly. When European traders arrived from Egypt

ii8 Chapter 6

in the 1850s they designated the local people by the name of this widely
spoken language, which they called Shooli y which became Achooli. The
paramount chiefs acquired so much wealth through trade with the Europe-
ans that they quickly became an aristocracy. By 1872 the British recorded
a single Luo-speaking tribe called the Acholi, an inter-regional ethnic
identity that had not existed two hundred years earlier.

Indo-European languages probably spread in a similar way among the
tribal societies of prehistoric Europe. Out-migrating Indo-European chiefs
probably carried with them an ideology of political clientage like that of
the Acholi chiefs, becoming patrons of their new clients among the local
population; and they introduced a new ritual system in which they, in
imitation of the gods, provided the animals for public sacrifices and feasts,
and were in turn rewarded with the recitation of praise poetry — all solidly
reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European culture, and all effective public
recruiting activities. Later Proto-Indo-European migrations also intro-
duced a new, mobile kind of pastoral economy made possible by the com-
bination of ox-drawn wagons and horseback riding. Expansion beyond a
few islands of authority might have waited until the new chiefdoms suc-
cessfully responded to external stresses, climatic or political. Then the
original chiefly core became the foundation for the development of a new
regional ethnic identity. Renfrew has called this mode of language shift
elite dominance but elite recruitment is probably a better term. The Normans
conquered England and the Celtic Galatians conquered central Anatolia,
but both failed to establish their languages among the local populations
they dominated. Immigrant elite languages are adopted only where an elite
status system is not only dominant but is also open to recruitment and alli-
ance. For people to change to a new language, the shift must provide a key
to integration within the new system, and those who join the system must
see an opportunity to rise within it. 29

A good example of how an open social system can encourage recruit-
ment and language shift, cited long ago by Mallory, was described by
Frederik Barth in eastern Afghanistan. Among the Pathans (today usu-
ally called Pashtun) on the Kandahar plateau, status depended on agri-
cultural surpluses that came from circumscribed river-bottom fields.
Pathan landowners competed for power in local councils ( jirga ) where
no man admitted to being subservient and all appeals were phrased as
requests among equals. The Baluch, a neighboring ethnic group, lived in
the arid mountains and were, of necessity, pastoral herders. Although
poor, the Baluch had an openly hierarchical political system, unlike the
Pathan. The Pathan had more weapons than the Baluch, more people,

Archaeology of Language 7/9

more wealth, and generally more power and status. Yet, at the Baluch-
Pathan frontier, many dispossessed Pathans crossed over to a new life as
clients of Baluchi chiefs. Because Pathan status was tied to land own-
ership, Pathans who had lost their land in feuds were doomed to menial
and peripheral lives. But Baluchi status was linked to herds, which could
grow rapidly if the herder was lucky; and to political alliances, not to
land. All Baluchi chiefs were the clients of more powerful chiefs, up to
the office of sardar , the highest Baluchi authority, who himself owed al-
legiance to the khan of Kalat. Among the Baluch there was no shame in
being the client of a powerful chief, and the possibilities for rapid eco-
nomic and political improvement were great. So, in a situation of chronic
low-level warfare at the Pathan-Baluch frontier, former agricultural ref-
ugees tended to flow toward the pastoral Baluch, and the Baluchi lan-
guage thus gained new speakers. Chronic tribal warfare might generally
favor pastoral over sedentary economies as herds can be defended by
moving them, whereas agricultural fields are an immobile target.

Migration and the Indo-European Languages

Folk migrations by pioneer farmers brought the first herding-and-farming
economies to the edge of the Pontic-Caspian steppes about 5800 BCE. In
the forest-steppe ecological zone northwest of the Black Sea the incoming
pioneer farmers established a cultural frontier between themselves and the
native foragers. This frontier was robust, defined by bundles of cultural
and economic differences, and it persisted for about twenty-five hundred
years. If I am right about persistent frontiers and language, it was a linguis-
tic frontier; it the other arguments in the preceding chapters are correct,
the incoming pioneers spoke a non-Indo-European language, and the for-
agers spoke a Pre-Proto-Indo-European language. Selected aspects of the
new farming economy (a little cattle herding, a little grain cultivation)
were adopted by the foragers who lived on the frontier, but away from the
frontier the local foragers kept hunting and fishing for many centuries.
At the frontier both societies could reach back to very different sources of
tradition in the lower Danube valley or in the steppes, providing a con-
tinuously renewed source of contrast and opposition.

Eventually, around 5200-5000 BCE, the new herding economy was
adopted by a few key forager groups on the Dnieper River, and it then dif-
fused very rapidly across most of the Pontic-Caspian steppes as far east as
the Volga and Ural rivers. This was a revolutionary event that transformed
not just the economy but also the rituals and politics of steppe societies.

120 Chapter 6

A new set of dialects and languages probably spread across the Pontic-
Caspian steppes with the new economic and ritual-political system. These
dialects were the ancestors of Proto-Indo-European.

With a clearer idea of how language and material culture are connected,
and with specific models indicating how migrations work and how they
might be connected with language shifts, we can now begin to examine
the archaeology of Indo-European origins.

PART TWO

The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes

Chapter Seven

How to Reconstruct a Dead Culture

The archaeology of Indo-European origins usually is described in terms
that seem arcane to most people, and that even archaeologists define dif-
ferently. So I offer a short explanation of how I approach the archaeologi-
cal evidence. To begin at the beginning, surprisingly enough, we must
start out in Denmark.

In 1807 the kingdom of Denmark was unsure of its prospects for sur-
vival. Defeated by Britain, threatened by Sweden, and soon to be aban-
doned by Norway, it looked to its glorious past to reassure its citizens of
their greatness. Plans for a National Museum of Antiquities, the first of its
type in Europe, were developed and promoted. Tie Royal Cabinet of An-
tiquities quickly acquired vast collections of artifacts that had been plowed
or dug from the ground under a newly expanded agricultural policy. Ama-
teur collectors among the country gentry, and quarrymen or ditch diggers
among the common folk, brought in glimmering hoards of bronze and
boxes of flint tools and bones.

In 1816, with dusty specimens piling up in the back room of the Royal
Library, the Royal Commission for the Preservation of Danish Antiq-
uities selected Christian J. Thomsen, a twenty-seven-year-old without a
university degree but known for his practicality and industry, to decide
how to arrange this overwhelming trove of strange and unknown objects
in some kind of order for its first display. After a year of cataloguing and
thinking, Thomsen elected to put the artifacts in three great halls. One
would be for the stone artifacts, which seemed to come from graves or
sediments belonging to a Stone Age, lacking any metals at all; one for the
bronze axes, trumpets, and spears of the Bronze Age, which seemed to
come from sites that lacked iron; and the last for the iron tools and weap-
ons, made during an Iron Age that continued into the era of the earliest
written references to Scandinavian history. Tie exhibit opened in 1819
and was a triumphant success. It inspired an animated discussion among

124 Chapter 7

European intellectuals about whether these three ages truly existed in
this chronological order, how old they were, and whether a science of ar-
chaeology, like the new science of historical linguistics, was possible. Jens
Worsaae, originally an assistant to Thomsen, proved, through careful ex-
cavation, that the Three Ages indeed existed as distinct prehistoric eras,
with some qualifications. But to do this he had to dig much more carefully
than the ditch diggers, borrowing stratigraphic methods from geology.
Thus professional field archaeology was born to solve a problem, not to
acquire things. 1

It was no longer possible, after Thomsens exhibit, for an educated per-
son to regard the prehistoric past as a single undifferentiated era into
which mammoth bones and iron swords could be thrown together. For-
ever after time was to be divided, a peculiarly satisfying task for mortals,
who now had a way to triumph over their most implacable foe. Once chro-
nology was discovered, tinkering with it quickly became addictive. Even
today chronological arguments dominate archaeological discussions in
Russia and Ukraine. Indeed, a chief problem preventing Western archae-
ologists from really understanding steppe archaeology is that Thomsens
Three Ages are defined differently in the steppes than in western Europe.
The Bronze Age seems like a simple concept, but if it began at different
times in places very close to each other, it can be complicated to apply.

The Bronze Age can be said to begin when bronze tools and ornaments
began to appear regularly in excavated graves and settlements. But what is
bronze? It is an alloy, and the oldest bronze was an alloy of copper and
arsenic. Arsenic, recognized by most of us simply as a poison, is in fact a
naturally occurring whitish mineral typically in the form of arsenopyrite,
which is frequently associated with copper ores in quartzitic copper depos-
its, and is probably how the alloy was discovered. In nature, arsenic rarely
comprises more than about 1% of a copper ore, and usually much less than
that. Ancient metalsmiths discovered that, if the arsenic content was
boosted to about 2-8% of the mixture, the finished metal was lighter in
color than pure copper, harder when cool, and, when molton, less viscous
and easier to cast. A bronze alloy even lighter in color, harder, and more
workable was copper and about 2-8% tin, but tin was rare in the ancient
Old World, so tin-bronzes only appeared later, after tin deposits were dis-
covered. The Bronze Age, therefore, marks that moment when metal-
smiths regularly began to mix molten minerals to make alloys that were
superior to naturally occurring copper. From that perspective, it immedi-
ately becomes clear that the Bronze Age would have started in different
places at different times.

Reconstructing a Dead Culture 125

The Three Ages in the Pontic-Caspian Steppes

The oldest Bronze Age in Europe began about 3700-3500 BCE, when
smiths started to make arsenical bronze in the North Caucasus Moun-
tains, the natural frontier between the Near East and the Pontic-Caspian
steppes. Arsenical bronzes, and the Bronze Age they signaled, appeared
centuries later in the steppes and eastern Europe including the lower Dan-
ube valley, beginning about 3300-3200 BCE; and the beginning of the
Bronze Age in central and western Europe was delayed a thousand years
after that, starting only about 2400-2200 BCE. Yet, an archaeologist
trained in western Europe may commonly ask why a Caucasian culture
dated 3700 BCE is called a Bronze Age culture, when this would be the
Stone Age (or Neolithic) in Britain or France. The answer is that bronze
metallurgy appeared first in eastern Europe and then spread to the west,
where it was adopted only after a surprisingly long delay. The Bronze Age
began in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, the probable Indo-European home-
land, much earlier than in Denmark.

The age preceding the Bronze Age in the steppes is called the Eneo-
lithic; Christian Thomsen did not recognize that period in Denmark. The
Eneolithic was a Copper Age, when metal tools and ornaments were used
widely but were made of unalloyed copper. This was the first age of metal,
and it lasted a long time in southeastern Europe, where European copper
metallurgy was invented. The Eneolithic did not appear in northern or
western Europe, which skipped directly from the Neolithic to the Bronze
Age. Experts in southeastern Europe disagree on how to divide the Eneo-
lithic internally; the chronological boundaries of the Early, Middle, and
Late Eneolithic are set at different times by different archaeologists in dif-
ferent regions. I have tried to follow what I see as an emerging inter-
regional consensus among Russian and Ukrainian archaeologists, and
between them and the archaeologists of eastern Poland, Bulgaria, Roma-
nia, Hungary, and the former Yugoslavia. 2

Before the Eneolithic was the Neolithic, the later end of Thomsens
Stone Age. Eventually the Stone Age was divided into the Old, Middle,
and New Stone Ages, or the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic. In So-
viet archaeology and in current Slavic or post-Soviet terminology the word
Neolithic is applied to prehistoric societies that made pottery but had not yet
discovered how to make metal. The invention of ceramics defined the be-
ginning of the Neolithic. Pottery, of course, was an important discovery.
Fire-resistant clay pots made it possible to cook stews and soups all day

126 Chapter 7

over a low fire, breaking down complex starches and proteins so that they
were easier to digest for people with delicate stomachs — babies and elders.
Soups that simmered in clay pots helped infants survive and kept old peo-
ple alive longer. Pottery also is a convenient “type fossil” for archaeologists,
easily recognized in archaeological sites. But Western archaeologists de-
fined the Neolithic differently. In Western archaeology, societies can only
be called Neolithic if they had economies based on food production — herd-
ing or farming or both. Hunters and gatherers who had pottery are called
Mesolithic. It is oddly ironic that capitalist archaeologists made the mode of
production central to their definition of the Neolithic, and Marxist archae-
ologists ignored it. Im not sure what this might say about archaeologists
and their politics, but here I must use the Eastern European definition of
the Neolithic — which includes both foragers and early farmers who made
pottery but used no metal tools or ornaments — because this is what Neo-
lithic means in Russian and Ukrainian archaeology.

Dating and the Radiocarbon Revolution

Radiocarbon dating created a revolution in prehistoric archaeology. From
Christian Thomsens museum exhibit until the mid-twentieth century ar-
chaeologists had no clear idea how old their artifacts were, even if they knew
how to place them in a sequence of types. The only way even to guess their
age was to attempt to relate dagger or ornament styles in Europe to similar
styles of known age in the Near East, where inscriptions provided dates go-
ing back to 3000 BCE. These long-distance stylistic comparisons, risky at
best, were useless for dating artifacts older than the earliest Near Eastern
inscriptions. Then, in 1949, Willard Libby demonstrated that the absolute
age (literally the number of years since death) of any organic material (wood,
bone, straw, shell, skin, hair, etc.) could be determined by counting its 14 C
content, and thus radiocarbon dating was born. A radiocarbon date reveals
when the dated sample died. Of course, the sample had to have been alive at
some point, which disqualified Libby’s discovery for dating rocks or miner-
als, but archaeologists often found charred wood from ancient fireplaces or
discarded animal bones in places where humans had lived. Libby was
awarded a Nobel Prize, and Europe acquired its own prehistory indepen-
dent of the civilizations of the Near East. Some important events such as
the invention of copper metallurgy were shown to have happened so early in
Europe that influence from the Near East was almost ruled out. 3

Chronological schemes based on radiocarbon dates have struggled
through several significant changes in methods since 1949 (see the appendix

Reconstructing a Dead Culture 127

in this volume). The most significant changes were the introduction of a
new method (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, or AMS) for counting how
much 14 C remained in a sample, which made all dates much more accu-
rate; and the realization that all radiocarbon dates, regardless of counting
method, had to be corrected using calibration tables, which revealed large
errors in old, uncalibrated dates. These periodic changes in methods and
results slowed the scientific reception of radiocarbon dates in the former
Soviet Union. Many Soviet archaeologists resisted radiocarbon dating,
partly because it sometimes contradicted their theories and chronologies;
partly because the first radiocarbon dates were later proved wrong by changes
in methods, making it possible that all radiocarbon dates might soon be
proved wrong by a newer refinement; and partly because the dates them-
selves, even when corrected and calibrated, sometimes made no sense — the
rate of error in radiocarbon dating in Soviet times seemed high.

A new problem affecting radiocarbon dates in the steppes is that old
carbon in solution in river water is absorbed by fish and then enters the
bones of people who eat a lot of fish. Many steppe archaeological sites are
cemeteries, and many radiocarbon dates in steppe archaeology are from hu-
man bones. Analysis of 15 N isotopes in human bone can tell us how much
fish a person ate. Measurements of l5 N in skeletons from early steppe cem-
eteries show that fish was very important in the diet of most steppe soci-
eties, including cattle herders, often accounting for about 50% of the food
consumed. Radiocarbon dates measured on the bones of these humans
might come out too old, contaminated by old carbon in the fish they ate.
This is a newly realized problem, one still without a solution widely agreed
on. The errors should be in the range of 100-500 radiocarbon years too
old, meaning that the person actually died 100-500 years after the date
given by the count of 14 C. I note in the text places where old carbon con-
tamination might be a problem making the dates measured on human
bones too old, and, in the appendix, I explain my own interim approach to
fixing the problem. 4

Attitudes toward radiocarbon dating in the CIS have changed since
1991. The major universities and institutes have thrown themselves
into new radiocarbon dating programs. The field collection of samples
for dating has become more careful and more widespread, laboratories
continuously improve their methods, and the error rate has fallen. It is
difficult now to keep up with the flow of new radiocarbon dates. They
have overthrown many old ideas and chronologies, including my own.
Some of the chronological relationships outlined in my 1985 Ph.D. dis-
sertation have now been proved wrong, and entire cultures I barely knew

128 Chapter 7

about in 1985 have become central to any understanding of steppe
archaeology. 5

But to understand people we need to know more than just when they
lived; we also need to know something about their economy and culture.
And in the specific case of the people of the Pontic-Caspian region, some
of the most important questions are about how they lived — whether they
were wandering nomads or lived in one place all year, whether they had
chiefs or lived in egalitarian groups without formal full-time leaders, and
how they went about getting their daily bread, if indeed they ate bread at
all. But to talk about these matters I first need to introduce some addi-
tional methods archaeologists use.

What Did They Eat?

One of the most salient signals of cultural identity is food. Long after im-
migrants give up their native clothing styles and languages, they retain
and even celebrate their traditional food. How the members of a society
get food is, of course, a central organizing fact of life for all humans. The
supermarkets we use so casually today are microcosms of modern Western
life: they would not exist without a highly specialized, capital-financed,
market-based economic structure; a consumer-oriented culture of prof-
ligate consumption (Do we really need fifteen kinds of mushrooms?);
interstate highways; suburbs; private automobiles; and dispersed nuclear
families lacking a grandma at home who could wash, chop, process, and
prepare meat and produce. Long ago, before all these modern conveniences
appeared, getting food determined how people spent much of their day,
every day: what time they woke in the morning, where they went to work,
what skills and knowledge they needed there, whether they could live in
independent family homes or needed the much larger communal labor
resources of a village, how long they were away from home, what kind of
ecological resources they needed, what cooking and food-preparation
skills they had to know, and even what foods they offered to the gods. In a
world dominated by the rhythms and values of raising crops and caring for
animals, clans with productive fields or large herds of cattle were the envy
of everyone. Wealth and the political power it conveyed were equated with
cultivated land and pasture.

To understand ancient agricultural and herding economies, archaeolo-
gists have to collect the animal bones from ancient garbage dumps with
the same care they devote to broken pottery, and they must also make
special efforts to recover carbonized plant remains. Luckily ancient people

Reconstructing a Dead Culture i2()

often buried their food trash in dumps or pits, restricting it to one place
where archaeologists can find it more easily. Although cow bones and
charred seeds cannot easily be displayed in the national museum, archae-
ology is not about collecting pretty things but about solving problems, so
in the following pages much attention is devoted to animal bones and
charred seeds.

Archaeologists count animal bones in two principal ways. Many bones
in garbage dumps had been broken into such small pieces for cooking that
they cannot be assigned to a specific animal species. Those that are big
enough or distinctive enough to assign to a definite species constitute the
NISP, or the “number of identified specimens,” where identified means as-
signable to a species. Thus, the NISP count, which describes the number
of bones found for each species, is the first way to count bones: three hun-
dred cattle, one hundred sheep, five horse. The second counting method is
to calculate the MNI, or the “minimum number of individuals” those
bones represent. If the five horse bones were each from a different animal,
they would represent five horses, whereas the hundred sheep bones might
all be from a single skeleton. The MNI is used to convert bones into mini-
mum meat weights — how much beef, for example, would be represented,
minimally, by a certain number of cattle bones. Meat weight, comprised of
fat and muscle, in most adult mammals averages about half the live body
weight, so by identifying the minimum number, age, and species of ani-
mals butchered at the site, the minimum meat weight, with some qualifi-
cations, can be estimated.

Seeds, like wheat and barley, were often parched by charring them
lightly over a fire to help preserve them for storage. Although many
charred seeds are accidentally lost in this process, without charring they
would soon rot into dust. The seeds preserved in archaeological sites have
been charred just enough to carbonize the seed hull. Seeds tell us which
plant foods were eaten, and can reveal the nature of the areas gardens,
fields, forests, groves, and vineyards. The recovery of charred seeds from
excavated sediments requires a flotation tank and a pump to force water
through the tank. Excavated dirt is dumped into the tank and the moving
water helps the seeds to float to the surface. They are then collected in
screens as the water flows out the top of the tank through an exit spout. In
the laboratory the species of plants are identified and counted, and domes-
ticated varieties of wheat, barley, millet, and oats are distinguished from
wild plant seeds. Flotation was rarely used in Western archaeology before
the late 1970s and was almost never used in Soviet archaeology. Soviet
paleobotanical experts relied on chance finds of seeds charred in burned

ijo Chapter 7

pots or on seed impressions preserved in the damp clay of a pot before it
had been fired. These lucky finds occur rarely. A true understanding of the
importance of plant foods in the steppes will come only after flotation
methods are widely used in excavations.

Archaeological Cultures and Living Cultures

The story that follows is populated rarely by individuals and more often
by cultures, which, although created and reproduced by people, act quite
differently than people do. Because “living cultures” contain so many
subgroups and variants, anthropologists have difficulty describing them
in the abstract, leading many anthropologists to discard the concept of a
“unitary culture” entirely. However, when cultural identities are contrasted
with other bordering cultures, they are much easier to describe.

Frederik Barth s investigations of border identities in Afghanistan sug-
gested that the reproduction and perhaps even the invention of cultural
identities often was generated by the continuous confrontation with Oth-
ers inherent in border situations. Today many anthropologists find this a
productive way to understand cultural identities, that is, as responses to
particular historical situations rather than as long-term phenomena, as
noted in the previous chapter. But cultural identities also carry emotional
and historical weight in the hearts of those who believe in them, and the
source of this shared emotional attachment is more complicated. It must
be derived from a shared set of customs and historical experiences, a font
of tradition that, even if largely imagined or invented, provides the fuel
that feeds border confrontations. If that font of tradition is given a geo-
graphic location or a homeland it is often away from the border, dispersed,
for example, across shrines, burial grounds, coronation sites, battlefields,
and landscape features like mountains and forests, all thought to be im-
bued with culture-specific spiritual forces. 6

Archaeological cultures are defined on the basis of potsherds, grave
types, architecture, and other material remains, so the relationship be-
tween archaeological cultures and living cultures might seem tenuous.
When Christian Thomsen and Jens Worsaae first began to divide arti-
facts into types, they were trying to arrange them in a chronological se-
quence; they soon realized, however, that a lot of regional variation also
cut across the chronological types. Archaeological cultures are meant to
capture and define that regional variation. An archaeological culture is a
recurring set of artifact types that co-occur in a particular region during
a set time period.

Reconstructing a Dead Culture iji

In practice, pottery types are often used as the key identifiers of ar-
chaeological cultures, as they are easy to find and recognize even in small
excavations, whereas the recognition of distinct house types, for example,
requires much larger exposures. But archaeological cultures should never
be defined on the basis of pottery alone. What makes an archaeological
culture interesting, and meaningful, is the co-occurrence of many similar
customs, crafts, and dwelling styles across a region, including, in addition
to ceramics, grave types, house types, settlement types (the arrangement
of houses in the typical settlement), tool types, and ritual symbols (figu-
rines, shrines, and deities.) Archaeologists worry about individual types
changing through time and shifting their areas of distribution, and we
should worry about these things, but we should not let problems with de-
fining individual tree species and ranges convince us that the forest is not
there. Archaeological cultures (like forests) are particularly recognizable
and definable at their borders, whereas regional variation in the back
country, away from the borders, might often present a more confusing
picture. It is at robust borders, defined by bundles of material-culture con-
trasts, where archaeological cultures and living cultures or societies might
actually correspond. As I argued in the previous chapter, robust borders
that persist for centuries probably were not just archaeological or cultural
but also linguistic.

Within archaeological cultures a few traits, archaeologists have learned,
are particularly important as keys to cultural identity. Most Western ar-
chaeologists accept that technological style, or the way an object is made,
is a more fundamental indicator of craft tradition than the way it is deco-
rated, its decorative style. The technology of production is more culture-
bound and resistant to change, rather like the core vocabulary in linguistics.
So clay tempering materials and firing methods usually are better indica-
tors of a potter’s cultural origin than the decorative styles the potter pro-
duced, and the same probably was true for metallurgy, weaving, and other
crafts. 7

One important alternative to archaeological cultures is the archaeologi-
cal horizon. A horizon , more like a popular fashion than a culture, can be
defined by a single artifact type or cluster of artifact types that spreads
suddenly over a very wide geographic area. In the modern world the blue
jeans and T-shirt complex is a horizon style, superimposed on diverse
populations and cultures around the planet but still representing an im-
portant diffusion of cultural influence, particularly youth culture, from an
area of origin in the United States. It is important, as it tells us something
about the place the United States occupied in world youth culture at the

ij2 Chapter 7

Reconstructing a Dead Culture ijj

moment of initial diffusion (the 1960s and 1970s), but it is not a migration
or cultural replacement. Similarly the Beaker horizon in Late Neolithic
Europe is defined primarily by a widespread style of decorated drinking
cups (beakers) and in many places by a few weapon types (copper daggers,
polished stone wrist-guards) that diffused with a new fashion in social
drinking. In most places these styles were superimposed on preexisting
archaeological cultures. A horizon is different from an archaeological cul-
ture because it is less robust it is defined on the basis of just a few traits —
and is often superimposed on local archaeological cultures. Horizons were
highly significant in the prehistoric Eurasian steppes.

The Big Questions Ahead

We will proceed on the assumption that Proto-Indo-European probably
was spoken in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, the Pontic-
Caspian steppes, broadly between 4500 and 2500 BCE. But we have to
start somewhat earlier to understand the evolution of Indo-European-
speaking societies. The speakers of Proto-Indo-European were a cattle-
keeping people. Where did the cattle come from? Both cattle and sheep
were introduced from outside, probably from the Danube valley (although
we also have to consider the possibility of a diffusion route through the
Caucasus Mountains). The Neolithic pioneers who imported domesticated
cattle and sheep into the Danube valley probably spoke non-Indo-European
languages ultimately derived from western Anatolia. Their arrival in the
eastern Carpathians, northwest of the Black Sea, around 5800 BCE, cre-
ated a cultural frontier between the native foragers and the immigrant
farmers that persisted for more than two thousand years.

The arrival of the first pioneer farmers and the creation of this cultural
frontier is described in chapter 8. A recurring theme will be the develop-
ment of the relationship between the farming cultures of the Danube val-
ley and the steppe cultures north of the Black Sea. Marija Gimbutas called
the Danubian farming cultures “Old Europe.” The agricultural towns of
Old Europe were the most technologically advanced and aesthetically so-
phisticated in all of Europe between about 6000 and 4000 BCE.

Chapter 9 describes the diffusion of the earliest cattle-and-sheep-
herding economy across the Pontic-Caspian steppes after about 5200-
5000 BCE. This event laid the foundation for the kinds of power politics
and rituals that defined early Proto-Indo-European culture. Cattle herd-
ing was not just a new way to get food; it also supported a new division of

society between high-status and ordinary people, a social hierarchy that
had not existed when daily sustenance was based on fishing and hunting.
Cattle and the cleavage of society into distinct statuses appeared together.
Right away, cattle, sheep — and horses — were offered together in sacrifices
at the funerals of a select group of people, who also carried unusual weap-
ons and ornamented their bodies in unique and ostentatious ways. They
were the new leaders of a new kind of steppe society.

Chapter 10 describes the discovery of horseback riding — a subject of in-
tense controversy — by these archaic steppe herding societies, probably be-
fore 4200 BCE. The intrusion into Old Europe of steppe herders, probably
mounted on horses, who either caused or took advantage of the collapse of
Old Europe, is the topic of chapter 11. Their spread into the lower Danube
valley about 4200-4000 BCE likely represented the initial expansion of
archaic Proto-Indo-European speakers into southeastern Europe, speaking
dialects that were ancestral to the later Anatolian languages.

Chapter 12 considers the influence of the earliest Mesopotamian urban
civilizations on steppe societies — and vice versa — at a very early age, about
3700—3100 BCE. The chiefs who lived in the North Caucasus Mountains
overlooking the steppes grew incredibly rich from long-distance trade
with the southern civilizations. The earliest wheeled vehicles, the first wag-
ons, probably rolled into the steppes through these mountains.

The societies that probably spoke classic Proto-Indo-European — the
herders of the Yamnaya horizon — are introduced in chapter 13. They were
the first people in the Eurasian steppes to create a herding economy that
required regular seasonal movements to new pastures throughout the year.
Wagons pulled by cattle allowed them to carry tents, water, and food into
the deep steppes, far from the river valleys, and horseback riding enabled
them to scout rapidly and over long distances and to herd on a large scale,
necessities in such an economy. Herds were spread out across the enor-
mous grasslands between the river valleys, making those grasslands use-
ful, which led to larger herds and the accumulation of greater wealth.

Chapters 14 through 16 describe the initial expansions of societies
speaking Proto-Indo-European dialects, to the east, the west, and finally
to the south, to Iran and the Indian subcontinent. I do not attempt to fol-
low what happened after the initial migrations of these groups; my effort
is just to understand the development and the first dispersal of speakers of
Proto-Indo-European and, along the way, to investigate the influence of
technological innovations in transportation — horseback riding, wheeled
vehicles, and chariots — in the opening of the Eurasian steppes.

Chapter Eight

First Farmers and Herders
The Pontic-Caspian Neolithic

At the beginning of time there were two brothers, twins, one named Man
C *Manu , in Proto-Indo-European) and the other Twin ( *Yemo ). They trav-
eled through the cosmos accompanied by a great cow. Eventually Man and
Twin decided to create the world we now inhabit. To do this, Man had to
sacrifice Twin (or, in some versions, the cow). From the parts of this sacri-
ficed body, with the help of the sky gods (Sky Father, Storm God of War,
Divine Twins), Man made the wind, the sun, the moon, the sea, earth, fire,
and finally all the various kinds of people. Man became the first priest, the
creator of the ritual of sacrifice that was the root of world order.

After the world was made, the sky-gods gave cattle to “Third man”
(*Trito). But the cattle were treacherously stolen by a three-headed, six-eyed
serpent ( *Ng w hi , the Proto-Indo-European root for negation). Third man
entreated the storm god to help get the cattle back. Together they went to
the cave (or mountain) of the monster, killed it (or the storm god killed it
alone), and freed the cattle. *Trito became the first warrior. He recovered
the wealth of the people, and his gift of cattle to the priests insured that the
sky gods received their share in the rising smoke of sacrificial fires. This
insured that the cycle of giving between gods and humans continued. 1

These two myths were fundamental to the Proto-Indo-European system
of religious belief *Manu and *Yemo are reflected in creation myths pre-
served in many Indo-European branches, where *Yemo appears as Indie
Yatna , Avestan Yima , Norse Ymir, and perhaps Roman Remus (from *iemus y
the archaic Italic form o {*yemo, meaning “twin”); and Man appears as Old
Indie Manu or Germanic Mannus , paired with his twin to create the world.
The deeds of *Trito have been analyzed at length by Bruce Lincoln, who
found the same basic story of the hero who recovered primordial lost cattle
from a three-headed monster in Indie, Iranian, Hittite, Norse, Roman and
Greek myths. The myth of Man and Twin established the importance of

I

First Farmers and Herders /jj

the sacrifice and the priest who regulated it. The myth of the “Third one”
defined the role of the warrior, who obtained animals for the people and
the gods. Many other themes are also reflected in these two stories: the
Indo-European fascination with binary doublings combined with triplets,
twos and threes, which reappeared again and again, even in the metric
structure of Indo-European poetry; the theme of pairs who represented
magical and legal power (Twin and Man, Varuna-Mitra, Odin-Tyr); and
the partition of society and the cosmos between three great functions or
roles: the priest (in both his magical and legal aspects), the warrior (the
Third Man), and the herder/cultivator (the cow or cattle). 2

For the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, domesticated cattle were
basic symbols of the generosity of the gods and the productivity of the
earth. Humans were created from a piece of the primordial cow. The ritual
duties that defined “proper” behavior revolved around the value, both
moral and economic, of cattle. Proto-Indo-European mythology was, at
its core, the worldview of a male-centered, cattle-raising people — not nec-
essarily cattle nomads but certainly people who held sons and cattle in the
highest esteem. Why were cattle (and sons) so important?

Domesticated Animals and Pontic-Caspian Ecology

Until about 5200-5000 BCE most of the people who lived in the steppes
north of the Black and Caspian Seas possessed no domesticated animals at
all. They depended instead on gathering nuts and wild plants, fishing, and
hunting wild animals; in other words, they were foragers. But the environ-
ment they were able to exploit profitably was only a small fraction of the
total steppe environment. The archaeological remains of their camps are
found almost entirely in river valleys. Riverine gallery forests provided
shelter, shade, firewood, building materials, deer, aurochs (European wild
cattle), and wild boar. Fish supplied an important part of the diet. Wider
river valleys like the Dnieper or Don had substantial gallery forests, kilo-
meters wide; smaller rivers had only scattered groves. The wide grassy
plateaus between the river valleys, the great majority of the steppe envi-
ronment, were forbidding places occupied only by wild equids and saiga
antelope. The foragers were able to hunt the wild equids, including horses.
The wild horses of the steppes were stout-legged, barrel-chested, stiff-
maned animals that probably looked very much like modern Przewalski
horses, the only truly wild horses left in the world. 3 The most efficient
hunting method would have been to ambush horse bands in a ravine, and
the easiest opportunity would have been when they came into the river

ij6 Chapter 8

valleys to drink or to find shelter. In the steppe regions, where wild horses
were most numerous, wild equid hunting was common. Often it supplied
most of the foragers’ terrestrial meat diet.

The Pontic-Caspian steppes are at the western end of a continuous
steppe belt which rolls east all the way to Mongolia. It is possible, if one is
so inclined, to walk, 5,000 km from the Danube delta across the center of
the Eurasian continent to Mongolia without ever leaving the steppes. But
a person on foot in the Eurasian steppes feels very small. Every footfall
raises the scent of crushed sage, and a puff of tiny white grasshoppers skips
ahead of your boot. Although the flowers that grow among the fescue and
feathergrass ( Festuca and Stipa ) make a wonderful boiled tea, the grass is
inedible, and outside the forested river valleys there is not much else to eat.
The summer temperature frequently rises to 110-T20°F (43-49°C), al-
though it is a dry heat and usually there is a breeze, so it is surprisingly
tolerable. Winter, however, kills quickly. The howling, snowy winds drive
temperatures below -35°F (— 37°C). The bitter cold of steppe winters (think
North Dakota) is the most serious limiting factor for humans and animals,
more restricting even than water, since there are shallow lakes in most
parts of the Eurasian steppes.

The dominant mammal of the interior steppes at the time our account
begins was the wild horse, Equus caballus. In the moister, lusher western
steppes of Ukraine, north of the Black Sea (the North Pontic steppes),
there was another, smaller equid that ranged into the lower Danube valley
and down to central Anatolia, Equus hydruntinus, the last one hunted to
extinction between 4000 and 3000 BCE. In the drier, more arid steppes
of the Caspian Depression was a third ass-like, long-eared equid, the ona-
ger, Equus hemionus y now endangered in the wild. Onagers then lived in
Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Iran, and in the Caspian Depression. Pontic-
Caspian foragers hunted all three.

The Caspian Depression was itself a sign of another important aspect
of the Pontic-Caspian environment: its instability. The Black and Caspian
Seas were not placid and unchanging. Between about 14,000 and 12,000
BCE the warming climate that ended the last Ice Age melted the north-
ern glaciers and the permafrost, releasing their combined meltwater in a
torrential surge that flowed south into the Caspian basin. The late Ice-Age
Caspian ballooned into a vast interior sea designated the Khvalynian Sea.
For two thousand years the northern shoreline stood near Saratov on the
middle Volga and Orenburg on the Ural River, restricting east-west move-
ment south of the Ural Mountains. The Khvalynian Sea separated the al-
ready noticeably different late-glacial forager cultures that prospered east

First Farmers and Herders Jjy

and west of the Ural Mountains. 4 Around 11,000-9,000 BCE the water
finally rose high enough to overflow catastrophically through a southwest-
ern outlet, the Manych Depression north of the North Caucasus Moun-
tains, and a violent flood poured into the Black Sea, which was then well
below the world ocean level. The Black Sea basin filled up until it over-
flowed, also through a southwestern outlet, the narrow Bosporus valley,
and finally poured into the Aegean. By 8000 BCE the Black Sea, now
about the size of California and seven thousand feet deep, was in equilib-
rium with the Aegean and the world ocean. The Caspian had fallen back
into its own basin and remained isolated thereafter. The Black Sea became
the Pontus Euxeinos of the Greeks, from which we derive the term Pontic
for the Black Sea region in general. The North Caspian Depression, once
the bottom of the northern end of the Khvalynian Sea, was left an enor-
mous flat plain of salty clays, incongruous beds of sea shells, and sands,
dotted with brackish lakes and covered with dry steppes that graded into
red sand deserts (the Ryn Peski) just north of the Caspian Sea. Herds of
saiga antelopes, onagers, and horses were hunted across these saline
plains by small bands of post-glacial Mesolithic and Neolithic hunters.
But, by the time the sea receded, they had become very different culturally
and probably linguistically on the eastern and western sides of the Ural-
Caspian frontier. When domesticated cattle were accepted by societies
west of the Urals, they were rejected by those east of the Urals, who re-
mained foragers for thousands of years. 5

Domesticated cattle and sheep started a revolutionary change in how
humans exploited the Pontic-Caspian steppe environment. Because cattle
and sheep were cultured, like humans, they were part of everyday work
and worry in a way never approached by wild animals. Humans identified
with their cattle and sheep, wrote poetry about them, and used them as a
currency in marriage gifts, debt payments, and the calculation of social
status. And they were grass processors. They converted plains of grass,
useless and even hostile to humans, into wool, felt, clothing, tents, milk,
yogurt, cheese, meat, marrow, and bone — the foundation of both life and
wealth. Cattle and sheep herds can grow rapidly with a little luck. Vulner-
able to bad weather and theft, they can also decline rapidly. Herding was a
volatile, boom-bust economy, and required a flexible, opportunistic social
organization.

Because cattle and sheep are easily stolen, unlike grain crops, cattle-raising
people tend to have problems with thieves, leading to conflict and warfare.
Under these circumstances brothers tend to stay close together. In Africa,
among Bantu-speaking tribes, the spread of cattle raising seems to have

ij8 Chapter 8

led to the loss of matrilineal social organizations and the spread of male-
centered patrilineal kinship systems. 6 Stockbreeding also created entirely
new kinds of political power and prestige by making possible elaborate
public sacrifices and gifts of animals. The connection between animals,
brothers, and power was the foundation on which new forms of male-
centered ritual and politics developed among Indo-European-speaking
societies. That is why the cow (and brothers) occupied such a central place
in Indo-European myths relating to how the world began.

So where did the cattle come from? When did the people living in the
Pontic-Caspian steppes begin to keep and care for herds of dappled cows?

The First Farmer-Forager Frontier in the
Pontic-Caspian Region

The first cattle herders in the Pontic-Caspian region arrived about
5800-5700 BCE from the Danube valley, and they probably spoke lan-
guages unrelated to Proto-Indo-European. They were the leading edge of
a broad movement of farming people that began around 6200 BCE when
pioneers from Greece and Macedonia plunged north into the temperate
forests of the Balkans and the Carpathian Basin (figure 8.1). Domesti-
cated sheep and cattle had been imported from Anatolia to Greece by
their ancestors centuries before, and now were herded northward into for-
ested southeastern Europe. Genetic research has shown that the cattle did
interbreed with the native European aurochs, the huge wild cattle of Eu-
rope, but only the male calves (traced on the Y chromosome) of aurochs
were kept, perhaps because they could improve the herd s size or resistance
to disease without affecting milk yields. The cows, probably already kept
for their milk, all were descended from mothers that had come from Ana-
tolia (traced through MtDNA). Wild aurochs cows probably were rela-
tively poor milk producers and might have been temperamentally difficult
to milk, so Neolithic European farmers made sure that all their cows were
born of long-domesticated mothers, but they did not mind a little cross-
breeding with native wild bulls to obtain larger domestic bulls. 7

Comparative studies of chain migration among recent and historical
pioneer farmers suggest that, in the beginning, the farming-and-herding
groups that first moved into temperate southeastern Europe probably
spoke similar dialects and recognized one another as cultural cousins.
The thin native population of foragers was certainly seen as culturally
and linguistically Other, regardless of how the two cultures interacted. 8
After an initial rapid burst of exploration (sites at Anzabegovo, Karanovo

First Farmers and Herders ijg

Figure 8.1 The migrations of pioneer farmers into Greece and across Europe
between 6500 and 5500 BCE, including the colonization of the eastern Car-
pathian piedmont by the Cri§ culture.

I, Gura Baciului, Cir^ea) pioneer groups became established in the Mid-
dle Danube plains north of Belgrade, where the type site of Starcevo and
other similar Neolithic settlements are located. This central Danubian
lowland produced two streams of migrants that leapfrogged in one di-
rection down the Danube, into Romania and Bulgaria, and in the other
up the Mure§ and Koros Rivers into Transylvania. Both migration
streams created similar pottery and tool types, assigned today to the Cri§
culture (figure 8.2). 9

First Farmers in the Pontic Region: The Cri§ Culture

The names Cri§ in Romania and Koros in eastern Hungary are two vari-
ants of the same river name and the same prehistoric culture. The north-
ern Cri§ people moved up the Hungarian rivers into the mountains of
Transylvania and then pushed over the top of the Carpathian ridges into

Figure 8.2 Cri^-culture ceramic shapes and decorative motifs (top half), flint
blades and cores (left), antler and bone tools (right), and ceramic rings (bottom)
dated 5700—5300 BCE. After Dergachev 1999; and Ursulescu 1984.

an ecologically rich and productive piedmont region east of the Carpathi-
ans. They herded their cattle and sheep down the eastern slopes into the
upper valleys of the Seret and Prut rivers about 5800-5700 BCE. (Cri<;
radiocarbon dates are unaffected by reservoir effects because they were not
measured on human bone; see table 8.1.) The other migration stream in
the lower Danube valley moved into the same eastern Carpathian pied-
mont from the south. These two groups created a northern and a southern
variant of the East Carpathian Cri§ culture, which survived from about
5800 to about 5300 BCE. Cri§ farms in the East Carpathian piedmont

First Farmers and Herders 141

Table 8.1

Radiocarbon Dates for the Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic of the
Pontic-Caspian Region.

Lab Number BP Date Sample Calibrated Date

1. Cri$ Culture Farming Settlements

Trestiana (Romania), phase III of the Cri$ culture

GrN-17003 6665±45 Charcoal 5640-5530 BCE

Carcea- Viaduct (Romania), phase IV of the Cri£ culture
Bln-1981 6540 ±60 ?

Bln-1982 6530 ±60 ?

Bln-1983 6395 ±60 ?

2. Linear Pottery (LBK) Farming Settlements

Tirpe^ti, Siret River, (Romania)

Bln-800 6170±100 ?

Bln-801 6245 ±100 ?

3. Bug-Dniester Mesolithic-Neolithic Settlements

Soroki II, level 1 early Bug-Dniester, Dniester valley

Bln-586 6825 ±150 ? 5870-5560 BCE

Soroki II, level 2 pre-ceramic Bug-Dniester, Dniester valley

Bln-587 7420 ±80 ? 6400-6210 BCE

Savran settlement, late Bug-Dniester, Dniester valley

Ki-6654 6985 ±60 ? 5980-5790 BCE

Bazkov Ostrov settlement, with early ceramics, South Bug valley
Ki-6651 7235 ±60 ? 6210-6010 BCE

Ki-6696 7215±55 ? 6200-6000 BCE

Ki-6652 7160±55 ? 6160-5920 BCE

Sokolets II settlement, with early ceramics, South Bug valley

Ki-6697 7470 ±60 ? 6400-6250 BCE

Ki-6698 7405 ±55 ? 6390-6210 BCE

4. Early Neolithic Elshanka-type Settlements, Middle Volga Region*

Chekalino 4, Sok River, Samara oblast

Le-4781 8990±100 shell 8290-7960 BCE

5260-4960 BCE
5320-5060 BCE

5610-5390 BCE
5610-5380 BCE
5470-5310 BCE

142 Chapter 8

Table 8.1 (continued)

Lab Number

BP Date

Sample

Calibrated Date

GrN-7085

8680 + 120

shell

7940-7580 BCE

Le-4783

8050 ±120

shell

7300-6700 BCE

Le-4782

8000 ±120

shell

7080-6690 BCE

GrN-7086

7950 ±130

shell

7050-6680 BCE

Le-4784

7940 ±140

shell

7050-6680 BCE

Chekalino 6, Sok River, Samara oblast

Le-4883

7940 ±140

shell

7050-6650 BCE

Ivanovka, upper Samara River, Orenburg oblast

Le-2343

8020 ±90

bone

7080-6770 BCE

5. Steppe Early Neolithic Settlements*

Matveev Kurgan

I, very primitive ceramics, Azov steppes

GrN-7199

7505 ±210

charcoal

6570-6080 BCE

Le-1217

71 80 ±70

charcoal

6160-5920 BCE

Matveev Kurgan

II, same material culture, Azov steppes

Le-882

5400 ±200

charcoal

4450-3980 BCE

Varfolomievka, Layer 3 (bottom ceramic

layer), North Caspian steppes

GIN -6546

6980 ±200

charcoal

6030-5660 BCE

Kair-Shak III, North Caspian steppes

GIN-5905

6950±190

p

6000-5660 BCE

GIN 5927

6720 ±80

?

5720-5550 BCE

Rakushechni Yar, lower Don shell midden, layers 14-15

Ki-6479

6925 ±110

p

5970-5710 BCE

Ki-6478

6930 ±100

p

5970-5610 BCE

Ki-6480

7040 ±100

p

6010-5800 BCE

Surskii Island, Dnieper Rapids forager settlement

Ki-6688

6980 ±65

p

5980-5780 BCE

Ki-6989

7125 ±60

?

6160-5910 BCE

Ki-6690

7195±55

p

6160-5990 BCE

Ki-6691

7245 ±60

p

6210-6020 BCE

First Farmers and Herders 143

were the source of the first domesticated cattle in the North Pontic region.
The Cri§ pioneers moved eastward through the forest-steppe zone in the
piedmont northwest of the Black Sea, where rainfall agriculture was pos-
sible, avoiding the lowland steppes on the coast and the lower courses of
the rivers that ran through them into the sea.

Archaeologists have identified at least thirty Cri§ settlement sites in
the East Carpathian piedmont, a region of forests interspersed with natu-
ral meadows cut by deep, twisting river valleys (figure 8.3). Most Cri§
farming hamlets were built on the second terraces of rivers, overlooking
the floodplain; some were located on steep-sided promontories above the
floodplain (Suceava); and a few farms were located on the high forested
ridges between the rivers (Sakarovka I). Houses were one room, built with
timber posts and beams, plaster-on-wattle walls, and probably reed-
thatched roofs. Larger homes, sometimes oval in outline, were built over
dug-out floors and contained a kitchen with a domed clay oven; lighter,
smaller structures were built on the surface with an open fire in the center.
Most villages consisted of just a few families living in perhaps three to ten
smoky thatched pit- dwellings, surrounded by agricultural fields, gardens,
plum orchards, and pastures for the animals. No Cri§ cemeteries are
known. We do not know what they did with their dead. We do know,
however, that they still prized and wore white shell bracelets made from
imported Spondylus, an Aegean species that was first made into bracelets
by the original pioneers in Early Neolithic Greece. 10

Cri§ families cultivated barley, millet, peas, and four varieties of wheat
(emmer, einkorn, spelt, and bread wheats). Wheat and peas were not na-
tive to southeastern Europe; they were exotics, domesticated in the Near
East, carried into Greece by sea-borne immigrant farmers, and propa-
gated through Europe from Greece. Residues inside pots suggest that
grains were often eaten in the form of a soup thickened with flour. Charred
fragments of Neolithic bread from Germany and Switzerland suggest that
wheat flour was also made into a batter that was fried or baked, or the
grains were moistened and pressed into small whole-grain baked loaves.
Cri§ harvesting sickles used a curved red deer antler inset with flint blades
5-10 cm long, angled so that their corners formed teeth. Their working
corners show “sickle gloss” from cutting grain. The same type of sickle and
flint blade is found in all the Early Neolithic farming settlements of the
Danube-Balkans-Carpathians. Most of the meat in the East Carpathian
Cri§ diet was from cattle and pigs, with red deer a close third, followed by
sheep — a distribution of species reflecting their largely forested environ-
ment. Their small-breed cows and pigs were slightly different from the

First Farmers and Herders 145

local wild aurochs or wild boar but not markedly so. The sheep, however,
were exotic newcomers, an invasive species like wheat and peas, brought
into the steep Carpathian valleys by strange people whose voices made a
new kind of sound. 11

Crij ceramic vessels were hand-made by the coiling method, and in-
cluded plain pots for cooking and storage, and a variety of fine wares with
polished reddish-brown surfaces — tureens, bowls, and cups on pedestals
(figure 8.2). Decorative designs were incised with a stick on the clay sur-
face before firing or were impressed with a fingernail. Very rarely they
were painted in broad brown stripes. The shapes and designs made by Cri$
settlers in the East Carpathians were characteristic of periods III and IV
of the Cri§ culture; older sites of stages I and II are found only in eastern
Hungary, the Danube valley, and Transylvania.

Cri$ farmers never penetrated east of the Prut-Dniester watershed. In
the Dniester valley they came face-to-face with a dense population of local
foragers, known today as the Bug-Dniester culture, named after the two
river valleys (Dniester and South Bug) where most of their sites are found.
The Bug-Dniester culture was the filter through which farming and stock-
breeding economies were introduced to Pontic-Caspian societies farther
east (figure 8.3).

The Cri$ people were different from their Bug-Dniester neighbors in
many ways: Cri$ flint tool kits featured large blades and tew scrapers,
whereas the foragers used microlithic blades and many scrapers; most Crij
villages were on the better-drained soils of the second terrace, convenient
for farming, and most foragers lived on the floodplain, convenient tor fish-
ing; whereas Cri§ woodworkers used polished stone axes, the foragers used
chipped flint axes; Cri$ pottery was distinct both in the way it was made
and its style of decoration; and Crij farmers raised and ate various exotic
foods, including mutton, which has a distinctive taste. Four forged cylin-
drical copper beads were found at the Crij site of Selishte, dated 5800-5600
BCE (68301100 BP). 12 They show an early awareness of the metallic
minerals in the mountains of Transylvania (copper, silver, gold) and the
Balkans (copper), something the foragers of southeastern Europe had
never noticed.

Some archaeologists have speculated that the East Carpathian Crif
culture could have been an acculturated population of local foragers who
had adopted a farming economy, rather than immigrant pioneers. 1 ’ This is
unlikely given the numerous similarities between the material culture and
economy of Cri§ sites in the Danube valley and the East Carpathians, and
the sharp differences between the East Carpathian Cri§ culture and the

/^6 Chapter 8

local foragers. But it really is of no consequence — no one seriously believes
that the East Carpathian Cri§ people were genetically ‘pure” anyway. The
important point is that the people who lived in Cri§ villages in the East
Carpathians were culturally Cri§ in almost all the material signs of their
identity, and given how they got there, almost certainly in nonmaterial
signs like language as well. The Cri§ culture came, without any doubt,
from the Danube valley.

The Language of the Crif Culture

If the Starcevo-Cri§-Karanovo migrants were at all similar to pioneer
farmers in North America, Brazil, southeast Asia, and other parts of the
world, it is very likely that they retained the language spoken in their par-
ent villages in northern Greece. Forager languages were more apt to de-
cline in the face of agricultural immigration. Farmers had a higher birth
rate; their settlements were larger, and were occupied permanently. They
produced food surpluses that were easier to store over the winter. Owning
and feeding “cultured” animals has always been seen as an utterly different
ethos from hunting wild ones, as Ian Hodder emphasized. The material
and ritual culture and economy of the immigrant farmers were imposed
on the landscapes of Greece and southeastern Europe and persisted there,
whereas the external signs of forager identity disappeared. The language
of the foragers might have had substrate effects on that of the farmers, but
it is difficult to imagine a plausible scenario under which it could have
competed with the farmers language. 14

What languages were spoken by Starcevo, Cri$, and Karanovo I pio-
neers? The parent language for all of them was spoken in the Thessalian
plain of Greece, where the first Neolithic settlements were founded about
6700—6500 BCE probably by seafarers who island-hopped from western
Anatolia in open boats. Katherine Perles has convincingly demonstrated
that the material culture and economy of the first farmers in Greece was
transplanted from the Near East or Anatolia. An origin somewhere in
western Anatolia is suggested bv similarities in pottery, flint tools, orna-
ments, female figurines, pintadera stamps, lip labrets, and other traits. The
migrants leapfrogged to the Thessalian plain, the richest agricultural land
in Greece, almost certainly on the basis of information from scouts (prob-
ably Aegean fishermen) who told their relatives in Anatolia about the
destination. The population of farmers in Thessaly grew rapidly. At least
120 Early Neolithic settlements stood on the Thessalian plain by 6200-
6000 BCE, when pioneers began to move north into the temperate forests

First Farmers and Herders 147

of southeastern Europe. The Neolithic villages of Thessaly provided the
original breeds of domesticated sheep, cattle, wheat, and barley, as well
as red-on-white pottery, female-centered domestic rituals, bracelets and
beads made of Aegean Spondylus shell, flint tool types, and other tradi-
tions that were carried into the Balkans. The language of Neolithic Thes-
saly probably was a dialect of a language spoken in western Anatolia about
6500 BCE. Simplification and leveling should have occurred among the
first colonist dialects in Thessaly, so the 120 villages occupied five hundred
years later spoke a language that had passed through a bottleneck and
probably was just beginning to separate again into strongly differentiated
dialects. 15

The tongue spoken by the first Cri§ farmers in the East Carpathian
foothills about 5800-5600 BCE was removed from the parent tongue
spoken by the first settlers in Thessaly by less than a thousand years — the
same interval that separates Modern American English from Anglo-
Saxon. That was long enough for several new Old European Neolithic
languages to have emerged from the Thessalian parent, but they would
have belonged to a single language family. That language family was not
Indo-European. It came from the wrong place (Anatolia and Greece) at
the wrong time (before 6500 BCE). Curiously a fragment of that lost lan-
guage might be preserved in the Proto-Indo-European term for bull,
*tawro-s , which many linguists think was borrowed from an Afro-Asiatic
term. The Afro-Asiatic super-family generated both Egyptian and Semitic
in the Near East, and one of its early languages might have been spoken in
Anatolia by the earliest farmers. Perhaps the Cri$ people spoke a language
of Afro-Asiatic type, and as they drove their cattle into the East Carpath-
ian valleys they called them something like *tawr-. 16

Farmer Meets Forager: The Bug-Dnif.ster Culture

The first indigenous North Pontic people to adopt Cri§ cattle breeding and
perhaps also the Cri§ word for bull were the people of the Bug-Dniester
culture, introduced a few pages ago. They occupied the frontier where the
expansion of the Cri§ farmers came to a halt, apparently blocked by the
Bug-Dniester culture itself. The initial contact between farmers and forag-
ers must have been a fascinating event. The Cri$ immigrants brought herds
of cultured animals that wandered up the hillsides among the deer. They
introduced sheep, plum orchards, and hot wheat-cakes. Their families
lived in the same place all year, year after year; they cut down the trees to
make houses and orchards and gardens; and they spoke a foreign language.

■

148 Chapter 8

The foragers’ language might have been part of the broad language family
from which Proto-Indo-European later emerged, although, since the ulti-
mate fate of the Bug-Dniester culture was extinction and assimilation,
their dialect probably died with their culture. 1 '

The Bug-Dniester culture grew out of Mesolithic forager cultures that
dwelt in the region since the end of the last Ice Age. Eleven Late Meso-
lithic technological-typological groups have been defined by differences in
flint tool kits just in Ukraine; other Late Mesolithic flint tool-based groups
have been identified in the Russian steppes east of the Don River, in the
North Caspian Depression, and in coastal Romania. Mesolithic camps
have been found in the lower Danube valley and the coastal steppes north-
west of the Black Sea, not far from the Cri§ settlement area. In the Do-
bruja, the peninsula of rocky hills skirted by the Danube delta at its
mouth, eighteen to twenty Mesolithic surface sites were found just in one
small area northwest of Tulcea on the southern terraces of the Danube
River. Late Mesolithic groups also occupied the northern side of the estu-
ary. Mirnoe is the best-studied site here. The Late Mesolithic hunters at
Mirnoe hunted wild aurochs (83% of bones), wild horse (14%), and the
extinct Equus hydruntinus (1.1%). Farther up the coast, away from the
Danube delta, the steppes were drier, and at Late Mesolithic Girzhevo, on
the lower Dniester, 62% of the bones were of wild horses, with fewer au-
rochs and Equus hydruntinus . There is no archaeological trace of contact
between these coastal steppe foragers and the Cri§ farmers who were ad-
vancing into the upland forest-steppe. 18

The story is different in the forest-steppe. At least twenty-five Bug-
Dniester sites have been excavated in the forest-steppe zone in the middle
and upper parts of the South Bug and Dniester River valleys, in the transi-
tional ecological zone where rainfall was sufficient for the growth of forests
but there were still open meadows and some pockets of steppe. This envi-
ronment was favored by the Cri§ immigrants. In it the native foragers had
for generations hunted red deer, roe deer, and wild boar, and caught riverine
fish (especially the huge river catfish, Siluris glanis). Early Bug-Dniester flint
tools showed similarities both to coastal steppe groups (Grebenikov and
Kukrekskaya types of tool kits) and northern forest groups (Donets types).

Pottery and the Beginning of the Neolithic

The Bug-Dniester culture was a Neolithic culture; Bug-Dniester people
knew how to make fired clay pottery vessels. The first pottery in the
Pontic-Caspian region, and the beginning of the Early Neolithic, is asso-

First Farmers and Herders 149

dated with the Elshanka culture in the Samara region in the middle
Volga River valley. It is dated by radiocarbon (on shell) about 7000-6500
BCE, which makes it, surprisingly, the oldest pottery in all of Europe.
The pots were made of a clay-rich mud collected from the bottoms of stag-
nant ponds. They were formed by the coiling method and were baked in
open fires at 450-600°C (figure 8.4). 19 From this northeastern source ce-
ramic technology diffused south and westward. It was adopted widely by
most foraging and fishing bands across the Pontic-Caspian region about
6200-6000 BCE, before any clear contact with southern farmers. Early
Neolithic pottery tempered with vegetal material and crushed shells ap-
peared at Surskii Island in the Dnieper Rapids in levels dated about
6200-5800 BCE. In the lower Don River valley a crude vegetal-tempered
pottery decorated with incised geometric motifs appeared at Rakushechni
Yar and other sites such as Samsonovka in levels dated 6000-5600 BCE. 20
Similar designs and vessel shapes, but made with a shell-tempered clay
fabric, appeared on the lower Volga, at Kair Shak III dated about 5700—
5600 BCE (6720 ±80 BP). Older pottery was made in the North Caspian
at Kugat, where a different kind of pottery was stratified beneath Kair
Shak-type pottery, possibly the same age as the pottery at Surskii Island.
Primitive, experimental ceramic fragments appeared about 6200 BCE
also at Matveev Kurgan in the steppes north of the Sea ot Azov. The old-
est pottery south of the middle Volga appeared at the Dnieper Rapids
(Surskii), on the lower Don (Rakushechni Yar), and on the lower Volga
(Kair Shak III, Kugat) at about the same time, around 6200-6000 BCE
(figure 8.4).

The earliest pottery in the South Bug valley was excavated by Danilenko
at Baskov Ostrov and Sokolets II, dated by five radiocarbon dates about
6200-6000 BCE, about the same age as Surskii on the Dnieper. 21 In the
Dniester River valley, just west of the South Bug, at Soroki II, archaeolo-
gists excavated two stratified Late Mesolithic occupations (levels 2 and 3)
dated by radiocarbon to about 6500-6200 BCE. They contained no pot-
tery. Pottery making was adopted by the early Bug-Dniester culture about
6200 BCE, probably the same general time it appeared in the Dnieper
valley and the Caspian Depression.

Fanner- Forager Exchanges in the Dniester Valley

After about 5800—5700 BCE, when Cri$ farmers moved into the East
Carpathian foothills from the west, the Dniester valley became a fron-
tier between two very different ways of life. At Soroki II the uppermost

Figure 8.4 Top: Early Neolithic ceramics of Elshanka type on
the middle Volga (7000-6500 BCE); middle: ceramics and flint
tools from Kugat (perhaps 6000 BCE), North Caspian; bottom:
ceramics and flint tools from Kair-Shak III (5700-5600 BCE)
North Caspian. After {top) Mamonov 1995; and {middle and bot-
tom) Barynkin and Kozin 1998.

First Farmers and Herders i$i

occupation level (1) was left by Bug-Dniester people who clearly had
made contact with the incoming Crif farmers, dated by good radiocar-
bon dates at about 5700-5500 BCE. Some of the ceramic vessels in level
1 were obvious copies ol Crif vessels — round-bodied, narrow-mouthed
jars on a ring base and bowls with carinated sides. But they were made
locally, using clay tempered with sand and plant fibers. The rest of the
pottery in level 1 looked more like indigenous bag-shaped South Bug
ceramics (figure 8.5). Continuity in the flint tools between level 1 and
the older levels 2 and 3 suggests that it was the same basic culture, and
all three levels are traditionally assigned to the Bug-Dniester culture.

The Bug-Dniester people who lived at Soroki II in the level 1 camp
copied more than just Crij pottery. Botanists found seed impressions in
the clay vessels of three kinds of wheat. Level 1 also yielded a few bones
from small domesticated cattle and pigs. This was the beginning of a sig-
nificant shift — the adoption of an imported food-production economy by
the native foragers. It is perhaps noteworthy that the exotic ceramic types
copied by Soroki II potters were small Cri$ pedestaled jars and bowls,
probably used to serve drink and food rather than to store or cook it. Per-
haps Crij foods were served to visiting foragers in jars and bowls like these
inside Cri§ houses, inspiring some Bug-Dniester families to re-create both
the new foods and the vessels in which they were served. But the original
decorative motifs on Bug-Dniester pottery, the shapes of the largest pots,
the vegetal and occasional shell temper in the clay, and the low-temperature
firing indicate that early Bug-Dniester potters knew their own techniques,
clays, and tempering formulas. The largest pots they made (for cooking?
storage?) were shaped like narrow-mouthed baskets, unlike any shape
made by Crij potters.

Three kinds of wheat impressions appeared in the clay of early Bug-
Dniester pots at two sites in the Dniester valley: Soroki II/level 1 and
Soroki III. Both sites had impressions of emmer, einkorn, and spelt. 22
Was the grain actually grown locally? Both sites had a variety of wheats,
with impressions of chaff and spikelets, parts removed during threshing.
The presence of threshing debris suggests that at least some grain was
grown and threshed locally. The foragers of the Dniester valley seem to
have cultivated at least small plots of grain very soon after their initial
contact with Cri$ farmers. What about the cattle?

In three Early Bug-Dniester Neolithic sites in the Dniester valley oc-
cupied about 5800-5500 BCE, domesticated cattle and swine averaged
24% of the 329 bones recovered from garbage pits, if each bone is counted
for the NISP; or 20% of the animals, if the bones are converted into a

i $2 Chapter 8

First Farmers and Herders i$j

Figure 8.5 Pottery types of the Bug-Dniester culture. The four vessels in the
top row appear to have been copied after Cri§ types seen in Figure 8.2. After
Markevich 1974; and Dergachev 1999.

minimum number of individuals, or MNI. Red deer and roe deer re-
mained more important than domesticated animals in the meat diet. Mid-
dle Bug-Dniester sites (Samchin phase), dated about 5600-5400 BCE,
contained more domesticated pigs and cattle: at Soroki I/level la, a
Middle-phase site, cattle and swine made up 49% of the 213 bones recov-
ered (32% MNI). By the Late (Savran) phase, about 5400-5000 BCE,
domesticated pigs and cattle totaled 55% of the animal bones (36% MNI)
in two sites. 23 In contrast, the Bug-Dniester settlement sites in the South

Bug valley, farther away from the source of the domesticated animals,
never showed more than 10% domesticated animal bones. But even in the
South Bug valley a few domesticated cattle and pigs appeared at Bas’kov
Ostrov and Mit’kov Ostrov very soon after the Cri§ farmers entered the
Eastern Carpathian foothills. The “availability” phase, in Zvelebils three-
phase description of farmer-forager interactions, was very brief. 24 Why?
What was so attractive about Cri§ foods and even the pottery vessels in
which they were served?

There are three possibilities: intermarriage, population pressure, and
status competition. Intermarriage is an often-repeated but not very con-
vincing explanation for incremental changes in material culture. In this
case, imported Crij-culture wives would be the vehicle through which
Cri^-culture pottery styles and foods should have appeared in Bug-Dniester
settlements. But Warren DeBoer has shown that wives who marry into a
foreign tribe among tribal societies often feel so exposed and insecure that
they become hyper-correct imitators of their new cultural mores rather
than a source of innovation. And the technology of Bug-Dniester ceramics,
the method of manufacture, was local. Technological styles are often better
indicators of ethnic origin than decorative styles. So, although there may
have been intermarriage, it is not a persuasive explanation for the innova-
tions in pottery or economy on the Dniester frontier. 25

Was it population pressure? Were the pre-Neolithic Bug-Dniester for-
agers running out of good hunting and fishing grounds, and looking for
ways to increase the amount of food that could be harvested within their
hunting territories? Probably not. The forest-steppe was an ideal hunting
territory, with maximal amounts of the forest-edge environment preferred
by deer. The abundant tree pollen in Cri$-period soils indicates that the
Cri$ pioneers had little impact on the forest around them, so their arrival
did not greatly reduce deer populations. A major component of the Bug-
Dniester diet was riverine fish, some of which supplied as much meat as
a small adult pig, and there is no evidence that fish stocks were falling.
Cattle and pigs might have been acquired by cautious foragers as a hedge
against a bad year, but the immediate motive probably was not hunger.

The third possibility is that the foragers were impressed by the abun-
dance of food available for feasting and seasonal festivals among Cri$
farmers. Perhaps some Bug-Dniester locals were invited to such festivals
by the Cri§ farmers in an attempt to encourage peaceful coexistence. So-
cially ambitious foragers might have begun to cultivate gardens and raise
cattle to sponsor feasts among their own people, even making serving
bowls and cups like those used in Cri§ villages — a political explanation,

i$4 Chapter 8

and one that also explains why Cri ? pots were copied. Unfortunately nei-
ther culture had cemeteries, and so we cannot examine graves to look for
evidence of a growing social hierarchy. Status objects seem to have been
few, with the possible exception of food itself. Probably both economic
insurance and social status played roles in the slow but steady adoption of
food production in the Dniester valley.

The importance of herding and cultivation in the Bug-Dniester diet
grew very gradually. In Cri§ settlements domesticated animals contributed
70-80% of the bones in kitchen middens. In Bug-Dniester settlements
domesticated animals exceeded hunted wild game only in the latest phase,
and only in the Dniester valley, immediately adjacent to Cri ? settlements.
Bug-Dniester people never ate mutton— not one single sheep bone has
been found in a Bug-Dniester site. Early Bug-Dniester bakers did not use
Crij-stvle saddle querns to grind their grain; instead, they initially used
small, rhomboidal stone mortars of a local style, switching to Crif-style
saddle querns only in the middle Bug-Dniester phase. They preferred their
own chipped flint axe types to the smaller polished stone Cri 5 axes. Their
pottery was quite distinctive. And their historical trajectory led directly
back to the local Mesolithic populations, unlike the Crij culture.

Even after 5500-5200 BCE, when a new farming culture, the Linear
Pottery culture, moved into the East Carpathian piedmont from southern
Poland and replaced the Cri$ culture, the Dniester valley frontier sur-
vived. No Linear Pottery sites are known east of the Dniester valley. 26 The
Dniester was a cultural frontier, not a natural one. It persisted despite the
passage of people and trade goods across it, and through significant cul-
tural changes on each side. Persistent cultural frontiers, particularly at the
edges of ancient migration streams, usually are ethnic and linguistic fron-
tiers. The Bug-Dniester people may well have spoken a language belong-
ing to the language family that produced Pre-Proto-Indo-European, while
their Cnj neighbors spoke a language distantly related to those of Neo-
lithic Greece and Anatolia.

Beyond the Frontier: Pontic-Caspian Foragers
before Cattle Arrived

The North Pontic societies east of the Dniester frontier continued to live
as they always had, by hunting, gathering wild plants, and fishing until
about 5200 BCE. Domesticated cattle and hot wheatcakes might have
seemed irresistibly attractive to the foragers who were in direct contact
with the farmers who presented and legitimized them, but, away from

First Farmers and Herders 155

that active frontier, North Pontic forager-fishers were in no rush to be-
come animal tenders. Domesticated animals can only be raised by people
who are committed morally and ethically to watching their families go
hungry rather than letting them eat the breeding stock. Seed grain and
breeding stock must be saved, not eaten, or there will be no crop and no
calves the next year. Foragers generally value immediate sharing and gen-
erosity over miserly saving for the future, so the shift to keeping breeding
stock was a moral as well as an economic one. It probably offended the old
morals. It is not surprising that it was resisted, or that when it did begin it
was surrounded by new rituals and a new kind of leadership, or that the
new leaders threw big feasts and shared food when the deferred invest-
ment paid off. These new rituals and leadership roles were the foundation
of Indo-European religion and society. 27

The most heavily populated part of the Pontic-Caspian steppes was the
place where the shift to cattle keeping happened next after the Bug-
Dniester region. This was around the Dnieper Rapids. The Dnieper Rap-
ids started at modern Dnepropetrovsk, where the Dnieper River began to
cut down to the coastal lowlands through a shelf of granite bedrock, drop-
ping 50 m in elevation over 66 km. The Rapids contained ten major cas-
cades, and in early historical accounts each one had its own name, guardian
spirits, and folklore. Fish migrating upstream, like the sudak ( Lucioperca ),
could be taken in vast quantities at the Rapids, and the swift water be-
tween the cascades was home to wels (Silurus g/a?iis) y a type of catfish that
grows to 16 feet. The bones of both types of fish are found in Mesolithic
and Neolithic camps near the Rapids. At the southern end of the Rapids
there was a ford near Kichkas where the wide Dnieper could be crossed
relatively easily on foot, a strategic place in a world without bridges.

The Rapids and many of the archaeological sites associated with them
were inundated by dams and reservoirs built between 1927 and 1958.
Among the many sites discovered in connection with reservoir construc-
tion was Igren 8 on the east bank of the Dn ieper. Here the deepest level F
contained Late Mesolithic Kukrekskaya flint tools; levels E and El above
contained Surskii Early Neolithic pottery (radiocarbon dated 6200-5800
BCE); and stratum D1 above that contained Middle Neolithic Dnieper-
Donets I pottery tempered with plant fibers and decorated with incised
chevrons and small comb stamps (probably about 5800-5200 BCE but
not directly dated by radiocarbon). The animal bones in the Dnieper-
Donets I garbage were from red deer and fish. The shift to cattle keeping
had not yet begun. Dnieper-Donets I was contemporary with the Bug-
Dniester culture. 28

Figure 8. 6 Dnieper-Donets I camp at Girli, Ukraine, probably about 5600-5200
BCE. After Neprina 1970 , Figures 3, 4, and 8.

Campsites of foragers who made Dnieper-Donets I (DDI) pottery
have been excavated on the southern borders of the Pripet Marshes in the
northwest and in the middle Donets valley in the east, or over much of
the forest-steppe and northern steppe zone of Ukraine. At Girli (figure
8.6) on the upper Teterev River near Zhitomir, west of Kiev, a DDI set-
tlement contained eight hearths arranged in a northeast-southwest line of
four pairs, each pair about 2-3 m apart, perhaps representing a shelter
some 14 m long for four families. Around the hearths were thirty-six
hundred flint tools including microlithic blades, and sherds of point-
based pots decorated with comb-stamped and pricked impressions. The
food economy depended on hunting and gathering. Girli was located on a
trail between the Dnieper and South Bug rivers, and the pottery was
similar in shape and decoration to some Bug-Dniester ceramics of the
middle or Samchin phase. But DDI sites did not contain domesticated
animals or plants, or even polished stone axes like those of the Cri$ and
late Bug-Dniester cultures; DDI axes were still chipped from large pieces
of flint. 29

■

First Farmers and Herders i$y

Forager Cemeteries around the Dnieper Rapids

Across most of Ukraine and European Russia post-glacial foragers did not
create cemeteries. The Bug-Dniester culture was typical: they buried their
dead by ones and twos, often using an old campsite, perhaps the one where
the death occurred. Graveside rituals took place but not in places set aside
just for them. Cemeteries were different: they were formal plots of ground
reserved just for funerals, funeral monuments, and public remembrance
of the dead. Cemeteries were visible statements connecting a piece of
land with the ancestors. During reservoir construction around the Dnieper
Rapids archaeologists found eight Mesolithic and forager Neolithic
cemeteries, among them Vasilievka I (twenty-four graves), Vasilievka II
(thirty-two graves), Vasilievka III (forty-five graves), Vasilievka V (thirty-
seven graves), Marievka (fifteen graves), and Volos’ke (nineteen graves). No
comparable cluster of forager cemeteries exists anywhere else in the Pontic-
Caspian region.

Several different forager populations seem to have competed with one
another around the Dnieper Rapids at the end of the Ice Age. Already by
about 8000 BCE, as soon as the glaciers melted, at least three skull-and-
face types, a narrow-faced gracile type (Volos’ke), a broad-faced medium-
weight type (Vasilievka I), and a broad-faced robust type (Vasilievka III)
occupied different cemeteries and were buried in different poses (con-
tracted and extended). Two of the nineteen individuals buried at Volos’ke
and two (perhaps three) of the forty-five at Vasilevka III were wounded by
weapons tipped with Kukrekskaya-type microlithic blades. The Vasilievka
III skeletal type and burial posture ultimately spread over the whole Rap-
ids during the Late Mesolithic, 7000—6200 BCE. Two cemeteries that
were assumed to be Early Neolithic (Vasilievka II and Marievka) because
of the style of the grave now are dated by radiocarbon to 6500-6000
BCE, or the Late Mesolithic.

Only one of the Dnieper Rapids cemeteries, Vasilievka V, is dated to the
Middle Neolithic DDI period by radiocarbon dates (5700-5300 BCE). At
Vasilevka V thirty-seven skeletons were buried in supine positions (on their
backs) with their hands near the pelvis, with their heads to the northeast.
Some were buried singly in individual pits, and others apparently were lay-
ered in reused graves. Sixteen graves in the center of the cemetery seem to
represent two or three superimposed layers of burials, the first hint of a col-
lective burial ritual that would be elaborated greatly in the following centu-
ries. Eighteen graves out of thirty-seven were sprinkled with red ochre,

jj8 Chapter 8

again a hint of things to come. The grave gifts at Vasilievka V, however,
were very simple, limited to microlithic flint blades and flint scrapers.
These were the last people on the Dnieper Rapids who clung to the old
morality and rejected cattle keeping. 30

Foragers on the Lower Volga and Lower Don

Different styles of pottery were made among the Early Neolithic foragers
who lived even farther east, a longer distance away from the forager/farmer
frontier on the Dniester. Forager camps on the lower Volga River dated
between 6000 and 5300 BCE contained flat-based open bowls made of
clay tempered with crushed shell and vegetal material, and were decorated
by stabbing rows of impressions with a triangular-ended stick or drawing
incised diamond and lozenge shapes. These decorative techniques were dif-
ferent from the comb-stamps used to decorate DD1 pottery in the Dnieper
valley. Flint tool kits on the Volga contained many geometric microliths,
60-70% of the tools, like the flint tools of the earlier Late Mesolithic for-
agers. Important Early Neolithic sites included Varfolomievka level 3 (ra-
diocarbon dated about 5900-5700 BCE) and Kair-Shak III (also dated
about 5900-5700 BCE) in the lower Volga region; and the lower levels at
Rakushechni Yar, a dune on the lower Don (dated 6000-5600 BCE). 31 At
Kair Shak III, located in an environment that was then semi-desert, the
economy was based almost entirely on hunting onagers ( Equus hemionus).
The animal bones at Varfolomievka, located in a small river valley in the
dry steppe, have not been reported separately by level, so it is impossible to
say what the level 3 Early Neolithic economy was, but half of all the ani-
mal bones at Varfolomievka were of horses {Equus caballus ), with some
bones of aurochs {Bos primigenius). Fish scales (unidentified) were found
on the floors of the dwellings. At Rakushechni Yar, then surrounded by
broad lower-Don valley gallery forests, hunters pursued red deer, wild
horses, and wild pigs. As I noted in several endnotes in this chapter,
some archaeologists have claimed that the herding of cattle and sheep
began earlier in the lower Don-Azov steppes, but this is unlikely. Before
5200 BCE the forager-farmer frontier remained confined to the Dniester
valley. 32

The Gods Give Cattle

The Cri§ colonization of the Eastern Carpathians about 5800 BCE cre-
ated a robust and persistent cultural frontier in the forest-steppe zone at

First Farmers and Herders 159

the Dniester valley. Although the Bug-Dniester culture quickly acquired
at least some domesticated cereals, pigs, and cattle, it retained an economy
based primarily on hunting and gathering, and remained culturally and
economically distinct in most ways. Beyond it, both in the forest-steppe
zone and the steppe river valleys to the east, no other indigenous societies
seem to have adopted cereal cultivation or domesticated animals until af-
ter about 5200 BCE.

In the Dniester valley, native North Pontic cultures had direct, face-to-
face contact with farmers who spoke a different language, had a different
religion, and introduced an array of invasive new plants and animals as if
they were something wonderful. The foragers on the frontier itself rapidly
accepted some cultivated plants and animals but rejected others, particu-
larly sheep. Hunting and fishing continued to supply most of the diet.
They did not display obvious signs of a shift to new rituals or social struc-
tures. Cattle keeping and wheat cultivation seem to have been pursued
part-time, and were employed as an insurance policy against bad years and
perhaps as a way of keeping up with the neighbors, not as a replacement of
the foraging economy and morality. For centuries even this halfway shift
to partial food production was limited to the Dniester valley, which be-
came a narrow and well-defined frontier. But after 5200 BCE a new
threshold in population density and social organization seems to have been
crossed among European Neolithic farmers. Villages in the East Carpath-
ian piedmont adopted new customs from the larger towns in the lower
Danube valley, and a new, more complex culture appeared, the Cucuteni-
Tripolye culture. Cucuteni-Tripolye villages spread eastward. The Dniester
frontier was breached, and large western farming communities pushed into
the Dniester and South Bug valleys. The Bug-Dniester culture, the origi-
nal frontier society, disappeared into the wave of Cucuteni-Tripolye immi-
grants.

But away to the east, around the Dnieper Rapids, the bones of domesti-
cated cattle, pigs, and, remarkably, even sheep began to appear regularly
in garbage dumps. The Dnieper Rapids was a strategic territory, and the
clans that controlled it already had more elaborate rituals than clans else-
where in the steppes. When they accepted cattle keeping it had rapid
economic and social consequences across the steppe zone.

Chapter Nine

Cows , Copper and Chiefs 161

Cows, Copper, and Chiefs

The Proto-Indo-European vocabulary contained a compound word (*weik-
potis) that referred to a village chief, an individual who held power within a
residential group; another root (*reg~) referred to another kind of powerful
officer. This second root was later used for king in Italic (rex), Celtic (rix),
and Old Indie (raj-), but it might originally have referred to an official more
like a priest, literally a “regulator” (from the same root) or “one who makes
things right ” (again the same root), possibly connected with drawing “cor-
reef (same root) boundaries. The speakers of Proto-Indo-European had
institutionalized offices of power and social ranks, and presumably showed
deference to the people who held them, and these powerful people, in re-
turn, sponsored feasts at which food and gifts were distributed. 1 When did
a hierarchy of social power first appear in the Pontic-Caspian region? How
was it expressed? And who were these powerful people?

Chiefs first appeared in the archaeological record of the Pontic-Caspian
steppes when domesticated cattle, sheep, and goats first became wide-
spread, after about 5200—5000 BCE. 2 An interesting aspect of the spread
of animal keeping in the steppes was the concurrent rapid rise of chiefs
who wore multiple belts and strings of polished shell beads, bone beads,
beaver-tooth and horse-tooth beads, boars tusk pendants, boars-tusk caps,
boars-tusk plates sewed to their clothing, pendants of crystal and porphyry!
polished stone bracelets, and gleaming copper rings. Their ornaments must
have clacked and rustled when they walked. Older chiefs carried maces
with polished stone mace-heads. Their funerals were accompanied by the
sacrifice of sheep, goats, cattle, and horses, with most of the meat and
bones distributed to the celebrants so only a few symbolic lower leg pieces
and an occasional skull, perhaps attached to a hide, remained in the grave.
No such ostentatious leaders had existed in the old hunting and gathering
bands of the Neolithic. What made their sudden rise even more intriguing
is that the nitrogen levels in their bones suggest that more than 50% of

t6h

their meat diet continued to come from fish. In the Volga region the bones
of horses, the preferred wild prey of the earlier hunters, still outnumbered
cattle and sheep in kitchen trash. The domesticated cattle and sheep that
played such a large ritual role were eaten only infrequently, particularly in
the east.

What seems at first to be the spread of a new food economy on second
look appears to be deeply interwined in new rituals, new values associated
with them, and new institutions of social power. People who did not accept
the new animal currency, who remained foragers, did not even use formal
cemeteries, much less sponsor such aggrandizing public funeral feasts.
Their dead still were buried simply, in plain clothing, in their old camping
places. The cultural gap widened between those who tended domesticated
animals, including foreign sheep and goats, and those who hunted native
wild animals.

The northern frontier of the new economy coincided with the ecological
divide between the forests in the north and the steppes in the south. The
northern hunters and fishers refused to be shackled to domesticated animals
for another two thousand years. Even in the intervening zone of forest-
steppe the percentage of domesticated animal bones declined and the im-
portance of hunted game increased. In contrast, the eastern frontier of the
new economy did not coincide with an ecotone but instead ran along the
Ural River, which drained the southern flanks of the Ural Mountains and
flowed south through the Caspian Depression into the Caspian Sea. East
of the Ural River, in the steppes of northern Kazakhstan, steppe foragers of
the Atbasar type continued to live by hunting wild horses, deer, and au-
rochs. They lived in camps sheltered by grassy bluffs on low river terraces or
on the marshy margins of lakes in the steppes. Their rejection of the new
western economy possibly was rooted in ethnic and linguistic differences
that had sharpened during the millennia between 14,000 and 9,000 BCE,
when the Khvalynian Sea had divided the societies of the Kazakh and the
Russian steppes. Regardless of its cause, the Ural valley became a persistent
frontier dividing western steppe societies that accepted domesticated ani-
mals from eastern steppe societies that rejected them.

Copper ornaments were among the gifts and baubles traded eastward
across the steppes from the Danube valley to the Volga-Ural region with
the first domesticated animals. The regular, widespread appearance of
copper in the Pontic-Caspian steppes signals the beginning of the Eneo-
lithic. The copper was Balkan in origin and probably was obtained with the
animals through the same trade networks. From this time forward Pontic-
Caspian steppe cultures were drawn into increasingly complicated social,

162 Chapter p

political, and economic relations with the cultures of the Balkans and the
lower Danube valley. The gulf between them, however, only intensified.
By 4400-4200 BCE, when the Old European cultures were at their peak
of economic productivity, population size, and stability, their frontier with
the Pontic-Caspian herding cultures was the most pronounced cultural
divide in prehistoric Europe, an even starker contrast than that between
the northern forest hunters and the steppe herders. The Neolithic and
Eneolithic cultures of the Balkans, Carpathians, and middle and lower
Danube valley had more productive farming economies in an age when
that really mattered, their towns and houses were much more substantial,
and their craft techniques, decorative aesthetics, and metallurgy were
more sophisticated than those of the steppes. The Early Eneolithic herd-
ing cultures of the steppes certainly were aware of the richly ornamented
and colorfully decorated people of Old Europe, but steppe societies devel-
oped in a different direction. 3

The Early Copper Age in Old Europe

There is an overall rhythm to the Eneolithic over most of southeastern Eu-
rope: a rise to a new level of social and technological complexity, its flour-
ishing, and its subsequent disintegration into smaller-scale, more mobile,
and technologically simpler communities at the opening of the Bronze Age.
But it began, developed, and ended differently in different places. Its be-
ginning is set at about 5200-5000 BCE in Bulgaria, which was in many
ways the heart and center of Old Europe. Pontic-Caspian steppe societies
were pulled into the Old European copper-trade network at least as early
as 4600 BCE, more than six hundred years before copper was regularly
used in Germany, Austria, or Poland. 4

The scattered farming hamlets of Bulgaria and southern Romania,
about 5200-5000 BCE, blossomed into increasingly large and solidly built
agricultural villages of large multiroomed timber and mud-plaster houses,
often two-storied, set in cleared and cultivated landscapes surrounded by
herds of cattle, pigs, and sheep. Cattle pulled ards, primitive scratch-
plows, across the fields. s In the Balkans and the fertile plains of the lower
Danube valley, villages were rebuilt on the same spot generation after gen-
eration, creating stratified tells that grew to heights of 30-50 feet, lifting
the village above its surrounding fields. Marija Gimbutas has made Old
Europe famous for the ubiquity and variety of its goddesses. Household
cults symbolized by broad-hipped female figurines were practiced every-
where. Marks incised on figurines and pots suggest the appearance of a

Cows, Copper, and Chiefs i6j

notation system. 6 Fragments of colored plaster suggest that house walls
were painted with the same swirling, curvilinear designs that appeared
on decorated pottery. Potters invented kilns that reached temperatures of
800-1100°C. They used a low-oxygen reducing atmosphere to create a
black ceramic surface that was painted with graphite to make silver de-
signs; or a bellows-aided high-oxygen atmosphere to create a red or orange
surface, intricately painted in white ribbons bordered with black and red.

Pottery kilns led to metallurgy. Copper was extracted from stone by
mixing powdered green-blue azurite or malachite minerals (possibly used
for pigments) with powdered charcoal and baking the mixture in a
bellows-aided kiln, perhaps accidentally at first. At 800°C the copper sepa-
rated from the powdered ore in tiny shining beads. It could then be tapped
out, reheated, forged, welded, annealed, and hammered into a wide variety
of tools (hooks, awls, blades) and ornaments (beads, rings, and other pen-
dants). Ornaments of gold (probably mined in Transylvania and coastal
Thrace) began to circulate in the same trade networks. The early phase of
copper working began before 5000 BCE.

Balkan smiths, about 4800-4600 BCE, learned to fashion molds that
withstood the heat of molten copper, and began to make cast copper tools
and weapons, a complicated process requiring a temperature of 1,083°C
to liquefy copper metal. Molten copper must be stirred, skimmed, and
poured correctly or it cools into a brittle object full of imperfections. Well-
made cast copper tools were used and exchanged across southeastern Eu-
rope by about 4600-4500 BCE in eastern Hungary with the Tiszapolgar
culture; in Serbia with the Vinca D culture; in Bulgaria at Varna and in
the Karanovo VI tell settlements; in Romania with the Gumelnitsa cul-
ture; and in Moldova and eastern Romania with the Cucuteni-Tripolye
culture. Metallurgy was a new and different kind of craft. It was obvious
to anyone that pots were made of clay, but even after being told that a
shiny copper ring was made from a green-stained rock, it was difficult to
see how. The magical aspect of copperworking set metalworkers apart,
and the demand for copper objects increased trade. Prospecting, mining,
and long-distance trade for ore and finished products introduced a new era
in inter-regional politics and interdependence that quickly reached deep
into the steppes as far as the Volga. 7

Kilns and smelters for pottery and copper consumed the forests, as did
two-storied timber houses and the bristling palisade walls that protected
many Old European settlements, particularly in northeastern Bulgaria. At
Durankulak and Sabla Ezerec in northeastern Bulgaria and at Tirpe^ti in
Romania, pollen cores taken near settlements show significant reductions

164 Chapter 9

Cows, Copper, and Chiefs 165

in local forest cover. 8 The earth s climate reached its post-glacial thermal
maximum, the Atlantic period, about 6000-4000 BCE, and was at its
warmest during the late Atlantic (paleoclimatic zone A3), beginning about
5200 BCE. Riverine forests in the steppe river valleys contracted because
of increased warmth and dryness, and grasslands expanded. In the forest-
steppe uplands majestic forests of elm, oak, and lime trees spread from the
Carpathians to the Urals by 5000 BCE. Wild honeybees, which preferred
lime and oak trees for nests, spread with them. 9

The Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture

The Cucuteni-Tripolye culture occupied the frontier between Old Europe
and the Pontic-Caspian cultures. More than twenty-seven hundred
Cucuteni-Tripolye sites have now been discovered and examined with
small excavations, and a few have been entirely excavated (figure 9.1). The
Cucuteni-Tripolye culture first appeared around 5200-5000 BCE and
survived a thousand years longer than any other part of the Old European
world. Tripolye people were still creating large houses and villages, ad-
vanced pottery and metals, and female figurines as late as 3000 BCE.
They were the sophisticated western neighbors of the steppe people who
probably spoke Proto-Indo-European.

Cucuteni-Tripolye is named after two archaeological sites: Cucuteni,
discovered in eastern Romania in 1909, and Tripolye, discovered in cen-
tral Ukraine in 1899. Romanian archaeologists use the name Cucuteni
and Ukrainians use Tripolye, each with its own system of internal chrono-
logical divisions, so we must use cumbersome labels like Pre-Cucuteni
III/Tripolye A to refer to a single prehistoric culture. There is a Borges-
like dreaminess to the Cucuteni pottery sequence: one phase (Cucuteni C)
is not a phase at all but rather a type of pottery probably made outside the
Cucuteni-Tripolye culture; another phase (Cucuteni Al) was defined be-
fore it was found, and never was found; still another (Cucteni A5) was
created in 1963 as a challenge for future scholars, and is now largely for-
gotten; and the whole sequence was first defined on the assumption, later
proved wrong, that the Cucuteni A phase was the oldest, so later archae-
ologists had to invent the Pre-Cucuteni phases I, II, and III, one of which
(Pre-Cucuteni I) might not exist. The positive side of this obsession with
pottery types and phases is that the pottery is known and studied in min-
ute detail. 10

fhe Cucuteni-Tripolye culture is defined most clearly by its decorated
pottery, female figurines, and houses. They first appeared about 5200-
5000 BCE in the East Carpathian piedmont. The late Linear Pottery

)Lebyazhinka

Gundurovka/ ‘ 'ty/, ll‘\V^

.Vilavatoe •Iv anovsk aya-

Jfoivoluchie V'

AKtoralynsk /jf

^"%/im\\ Khlopkovsk "

• Varfolomievka

lOrlovka

A? Alexandria

Buzki

reivkaf^^J 0

v Sxelia'^C^Pl'

N 1 kol 5 koeT- *Ya si novat ka . .
I Sobachki}

I f Mariupol

Vita Litovskaya.

Kara Khuduk

Bemashevka

Dzhangar

RakushechniYar

Draguseni

% % A \

Karbuna'

‘Kamennomost #Ndlt,,ik \

■Qn&North CAUCASUS Mts.

‘Bolgrad!

Gumelnitsa.

•]Durankulak

Shulaveri

Karanovo.tell'

settlements

Steppe/Forest-steppe

boundary

AEGEAN

Figure 9.1 Early Eneolithic sites in the Pontic-Caspian region.

people of the East Carpathians acquired these new traditions from the late
Boian-Giule^ti and late Hamangia cultures of the lower Danube valley.
They adopted Boian and Hamangia design motifs in pottery, Boian-style
female figurines, and some aspects of Boian house architecture (a clay
floor fired before the walls were raised, called a ploshchadka floor in Rus-
sian). They acquired objects made of Balkan copper and Dobrujan flint,
again from the Danube valley. The borrowed customs were core aspects of
any tribal farming culture — domestic pottery production, domestic archi-
tecture, and domestic female-centered rituals — and so it seems likely that
at least some Boian people migrated up into the steep, thickly forested val-
leys at the peakline of the East Carpathians. Their appearance defined the

1 66 Chapter p

beginning of the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture — phases Pre-Cucuteni I (?)
and II (about 5200-4900 BCE).

The first places that showed the new styles were clustered near high Car-
pathian passes, and perhaps attracted migrants partly because they con-
trolled passage through the mountains. From these high Carpathian valleys
the new styles and domestic rituals spread quickly northeastward to Pre-
Cucuteni II settlements located as far east as the Dniester valley. As the
culture developed (during pre-Cucteni III/Tripolye A) it was carried across
the Dniester, erasing a cultural frontier that had existed for six hundred to
eight hundred years, and into the South Bug River valley in Ukraine. Bug-
Dniester sites disappeared. Tripolye A villages occupied the South Bug
valley from about 4900-4800 BCE to about 4300-4200 BCE.

The Cucuteni-Tripolye culture made a visible mark on the forest-steppe
environment, reducing the forest and creating pastures and cultivated
fields over wider areas. At Flore^ti, on a tributary of the Seret River, the re-
mains of a late Linear Pottery homestead, radiocarbon dated about 5200-
5100 BCE, consisted of a single house with associated garbage pits, set in
a clearing in an oak-elm forest — tree pollen was 43% of all pollen. Strati-
fied above it was a late Pre-Cucuteni III village, dated about 4300 BCE,
with at least ten houses set in a much more open landscape — tree pollen
was only 23%. 11

Very few Bug-Dniester traits can be detected in early Cucuteni-Tripolye
artifacts. The late Bug-Dniester culture was absorbed or driven away, re-
moving the buffer culture that had mediated interchanges on the fron-
tier. 12 Tie frontier shifted eastward to the uplands between the Southern
Bug and Dnieper rivers. This soon became the most clearly defined, high-
contrast cultural frontier in all of Europe.

The Early Cucuteni-Tripolye Village at Bemashevka

A good example of an early Cucuteni-Tripolye farming village on that
moving frontier is the site of Bernashevka, wholly excavated by V. G. Zbe-
novich between 1972 and 1975. 13 On a terrace overlooking the Dniester
River floodplain six houses were built in a circle around one large struc-
ture (figure 9.2). The central building, 12 by 8 m, had a foundation of
horizontal wooden beams, or sleeper beams, probably with vertical wall
posts morticed into them. The walls were wattle-and-daub, the roof
thatched, and the floor made of smooth fired clay 8-17 cm thick on a sub-
floor of timber beams (a ploshchadka). The door had a flat stone threshold,
and inside was the only domed clay oven in the settlement — perhaps a

Cows, Copper and Chiefs i6y

Figure 9.2 Bernashevka settlement on the Dniester River. After Zbenovich
1980, figure 3.

central bakery and work building for the village. The houses ranged from
30 m 2 to 150 m 2 in floor area. The population of the village probably was
forty to sixty people. Two radiocarbon dates (5500-5300 bce) seem two
hundred years too old (table 9.1), perhaps because the dated wood frag-
ments were from burned heartwood that had died centuries before the
village was occupied.

No cemetery was found at Bernashevka or at any other Cucuteni-
Tripolye village. Like the Cri§ people, the Cucuteni-Tripolye people did
not ordinarily bury their dead. Parts of human skeletons are occasionally
found in ritual deposits beneath house floors, human teeth were used oc-
casionally as beads, and at Dragu^eni (Cucuteni A4, about 4300-4000
BCE) loose human bones were found in the litter between houses. Perhaps

1 68 Chapter 9

Cows, Copper , ; and Chiefs 169

Table 9.1

Early Eneolithic Radiocarbon Dates

Lab Number BP Date

Sample

Calibrated Date

1 - Pre-Cucuteni II Settlements

Bernashevka

Ki-6670

6440 ±60

}

5490-5300 BCE

Ki-6681

6510+55

}

5620-5360 BCE

Okopi

Ki-6671

6330165

>

5470-5210 BCE

2 . Tripolye A Settlements

Sabatinovka 2

Ki-6680

6075160

}

5060-4850 BCE

Ki-6737

6100155

}

5210-4850 BCE

Luka Vrublevetskaya

Ki-6684

5905160

>

4850-4710 BCE

Ki-6685

5845150

}

4780-4610 BCE

Grenovka

Ki-6683

5860145

?

4790-4620 BCE

Ki-6682

5800150

>

4720-4550 BCE

3 . Dnieper

-Donets II Cemeteries (average 15 N= 11.8, average offset 228130

too old)

Osipovka cemetery

Skeleton #

OxA6168

7675170

skeleton 20, bone (invalid?)*

6590-6440 BCE

Ki 517

60751125

skeleton 53

5210-4800 BCE

Ki 519

5940 1 420

skeleton 53

5350-4350 BCE

Nikol’skoe

cemetery

Grave Pit , Skeleton #

OxA 5029

6300180

E, skeleton 125

5370-5080 BCE

OxA 6155

6225175

Z, skeleton 94

5300-5060 BCE

Ki 6603

6160170

E, skeleton 125

5230-4990 BCE

OxA 5052

6145170

Z, skeleton 137

5210-4950 BCE

Ki 523

56401400

skeleton ?

4950-4000 BCE

Ki 3125

5560130

Z, bone

4460-4350 BCE

Table 9.1 ( continued )

Lab Number

BP Date

Sample

Calibrated Date

Ki 3575

5560130

B, skeleton 1

4460-4350 BCE

Ki 3283

5460140

E, skeleton 125 (invalid?)

4450-4355 BCE

Ki 5159

5340150

Z, skeleton 105 (invalid?)

4250-4040 BCE

Ki 3158

5230140

Z, bone (invalid?)

4220-3970 BCE

Ki 3284

5200130

E, skeleton 115 (invalid?)

4040-3970 BCE

Ki 3410

5200130

D, skeleton 79a (invalid?)

4040-3970 BCE

Yasinovatka cemetery
OxA 6163 6465160

skeleton 5

5480-5360 BCE

OxA 6165

6370170

skeleton 19

5470-5290 BCE

Ki-6788

6310185

skeleton 19

5470-5080 BCE

OxA 6164

6360160

skeleton 45

5470-5290 BCE

Ki-6791

6305180

skeleton 45

5370-5080 BCE

Ki-6789

6295170

skeleton 21

5370-5080 BCE

OxA 5057

62601180

skeleton 36

5470-4990 BCE

Ki-1171

5800170

skeleton 36

4770-4550 BCE

OxA 6167

6255155

skeleton 18

5310-5080 BCE

Ki-3032

5900190

skeleton 18

4910-4620 BCE

Ki-6790

5860175

skeleton 39

4840-4610 BCE

Ki-3160

5730 1 40

skeleton 15

4670-4490 BCE

Dereivka 1 cemetery
OxA 6159 6200160

skeleton 42

5260-5050 BCE

OxA 6162

6175160

skeleton 33

5260-5000 BCE

Ki-6728

6145155

skeleton 11

5210-4960 BCE

4 . Rakushechni Yar Settlement, Lower Don River

Bln 704

60701100

level 8, charcoal

5210-4900 BCE

Ki-955

57901100

level 5, shell

4790-4530 BCE

Ki-3545

5150170

level 4, ?

4040-3800 BCE

Bln 1177

43601100

level 3, ?

3310-2880 BCE

5. Khvalynsk Cemetery (average 15 N=14.8, average offset 408 ±52 too old)

AA12571

6200185

cemetery II, grave 30

5250-5050 BCE

AA12572

5985185

cemetery II, grave 18

5040-4780 BCE

OxA 4310

6040180

cemetery II, ?

5040-4800 BCE

i jo Chapter 9

Table 9.1 ( continued )

Lab Number

BP Date

Sample

Calibrated Date

OxA 4314

6015 + 85

cemetery II, grave 18

5060-4790 BCE

OxA 4313

5920 ±80

cemetery II, grave 34

4940-4720 BCE

OxA 4312

5830 ±80

cemetery II, grave 24

4840-4580 BCE

OxA 4311

5790±80

cemetery II, grave 10

4780-4570 BCE

UPI119

5903 ±72

cemetery I, grave 4

4900-4720 BCE

UPI120

5808 ±79

cemetery I, grave 26

4790-4580 BCE

UPI132

6085 ±193

cemetery I, grave 13

5242-4780 BCE

6. Lower Volga Cultures

Varfolomievka settlement, North Caspian

Lu2642

6400 ±230

level 2B, unknown material 5570-5070 BCE

Lu2620

6090 ±160

level 2B,

5220-4840 BCE

Ki-3589

5430 ±60

level 2A,

4350-4170 BCE

Ki-3595

5390 ±60

level 2A,

4340-4050 BCE

Kombak-Te, Khvalynsk hunting camp in the North Caspian

GIN 6226

6000 ±150

>

5210-4710 BCE

Kara-Khuduk, Khvalynsk hunting camp in the North Caspian

UPI 431

5110±45

>

3800-3970 BCE

* “Invalid" means the date was contradicted by stratigraphy or by another date.

bodies were exposed and permitted to return to the birds somewhere near
the village. As Gimbutas noted, some Tripolye female figurines seem to
be wearing bird masks.

Half the pottery at Bernashevka was coarse ware: thick-walled, rela-
tively crude vessels tempered with sand, quartz, and grog (crushed ceramic
sherds) decorated with rows of stabbed impressions or shallow channels
impressed with a spatula in swirling patterns (figure 9.3). Some of these
were perforated strainers, perhaps used for making cheese or yogurt. An-
other 30% were thin-walled, fine-tempered jugs, lidded bowls, and ladles.
The last 20% were very fine, thin-walled, quite beautiful lidded jugs and
bowls (probably for individual servings of food), ladles (for serving), and
hollow-pedestaled “fruit-stands” (perhaps for food presentation), elabo-
rately decorated over the entire surface with stamped, incised, and chan-
neled motifs, some enhanced with white paint against the orange clay.

ujijK

Lidded bowls and jugs imply that food was served in individual containers
at some distance from the hearth where it was cooked, and their careful
decoration implies that the presentation of food involved an element of
social theater, an unveiling.

Every house at Bernashevka contained fragmented ceramic female figu-
rines with joined legs, exaggerated hips and buttocks, and schematic rod-
like heads, about 10cm long (figure 9.3). Simple incisions indicated the
pubis and a girdle or waistband. Figurines were found at various places on
the house floors; there was no obvious domestic shrine or altar. The num-
ber of figurines per house ranged from one to twenty-one, but four houses
had nine or more. Almost two thousand similar figurines have been found
in other Pre-Cucuteni II-III/Tripolye A sites, occasionally arranged in
groups seated in chairs. At the Tripolye A site of Luka-Vrublevetskaya on
the Dniester, they were made of clay tempered with a mixture of wheat,

Figure 9.3 Artifacts of the Pre-Cucuteni II/III-Tripolye A period from the
sites of Bernashevka (most), Bernovo (labeled), and Lenkovtsi (labeled). Af-
ter Zbenovich 1980, figures 55, 57, 61, 69, 71, 75, 79; and Zbenovich 1989,
figure 65, 74.

Cucuteni-Tripolye
Material Culture

172 Chapter 9

barley, and millet grains — all the grains cultivated in the village— and
with finely ground flour. These, at least, seem to have symbolized the gen-
erative fertility of cultivated grain. But they were only one aspect of domes-
tic cults. Under every house at Bernashevka was the skull of a domesticated
cow or bull. One house also had wild animal symbols: the skull of a wild
aurochs and the antlers of a red deer. Preconstruction foundation deposits
of cattle horns and skulls, and occasionally of human skulls, are found in
many Tripolye A villages. Bovine and female spirit powers were central to
domestic household cults.

Hie Bernashevka farmers cultivated emmer and spelt wheats, with some
barley and millet. Fields were prepared with mattocks made of antler
(nineteen examples were found) and polished slate (twenty examples); some
of these might have been attached to ards, which were primitive plows. The
grain was harvested with flint blades of the Karanovo type (figure 9.3).

The animal bones from Bernashevka are the largest sample from any
early Cucuteni-Tripolye site: 12,657 identifiable bones from a minimum of
804 animals. About 50% of the bones (60% of the individuals) were from
wild animals, principally red deer ( Cervus elaphus ) and wild pig. Roe deer
( Capreolus capreolus) and the wild aurochs (Bos primigenius) were hunted
occasionally. Many early Cucuteni-Tripolye sites have about 50% wild
animal bones. Like Bernashevka, most were frontier settlements estab-
lished in places not previously cleared or farmed. In contrast, at the long-
settled locale of Tirpe^ti the Pre-Cucuteni III settlement produced 95%
domesticated animal bones. And even in frontier settlements like Berna-
shevka, about 50% of all animal bones were from cattle, sheep/goat, and
pigs. Cattle and pigs were more important in heavily forested areas like
Bernashevka, where cattle constituted 75% of the domesticated animal
bones, whereas sheep and goats were more important in villages closer to
the steppe border.

Pre-Cucuteni II Bernashevka was abandoned before copper tools and
ornaments became common enough to lose casually; no copper artifacts
were left in the settlement. But only a few centuries later small copper
artifacts became common. At Tripolye A Luka-Vrublevetskaya, probably
occupied about 4800-4600 BCE, 12 copper objects (awls, fishhooks, a
bead, a ring) were found among seven houses in piles of discarded shell-
fish, animal bones, and broken crockery. At Karbuna, near the steppe
boundary, probably occupied about 4500—4400 BCE, a spectacular hoard
of 444 copper objects was buried in a fine late Tripolye A pot closed with
a Tripolye A bowl (figure 9.4). The hoard contained two cast copper
hammer-axes 13-14 cm long, hundreds of copper beads, and dozens of flat

Cows, Copper, and Chiefs iyj

Figure 9.4 Part of the Karbuna hoard with the Tripolye A pot and bowl-lid in
which it was found. All illustrated objects except the pot and lid are copper,
and all are the same scale. After Dergachev 1998.

“idols,” or wide-bottomed pendants made of flat sheet copper; two
hammer-axes of marble and slate with drilled shaft-holes for the handle;
127 drilled beads made of red deer teeth; 1 drilled human tooth; and 254
beads, plaques, or bracelets made of Spondylus shell, an Aegean shell used
for ornaments continuously from the first Greek Neolithic through the
Old European Eneolithic. The Karbuna copper came from Balkan ores,
and the Aegean shell was traded from the same direction, probably
through the tell towns of the lower Danube valley. By about 4500 BCE
social prestige had become closely linked to the accumulation of exotic
commodities, including copper. 14

As Cucuteni-Tripolye farmers moved eastward out of the East Carpath-
ian piedmont they began to enter a more open, gently rolling, drier land-
scape. East of the Dniester River annual precipitation declined and the
forests thinned. The already-old cultural frontier moved to the Southern
Bug river valley. The Tripolye A town of Mogilnoe IV, among the first es-
tablished in the South Bug valley, had more than a hundred buildings and

174 Chapter 9

covered 15-20 hectares, with a population of perhaps between four hundred
and seven hundred. East of the Southern Bug, in the Dnieper valley, were
people of a very different cultural tradition: the Dnieper-Donets II culture.

The Dnieper-Donets II Culture

Dimitri Telegin defined the Dnieper-Donets II culture based on a series
of excavated cemeteries and settlement sites in the Dnieper valley, in the
steppes north of the Sea of Azov, and in the Donets valley. Dnieper-
Donets II societies created large, elaborate cemeteries, made no female
figurines, had open fires rather than kilns or ovens in their homes, lived in
bark-covered huts rather than in large houses with fired clay floors, had no
towns, cultivated little or no grain, and their pottery was very different in
appearance and technology from Tripolye ceramics. The trajectory of the
Cucuteni-Tripolye culture led back to the Neolithic societies of Old Eu-
rope, and that of Dnieper-Donets II led to the local Mesolithic foragers.
They were fundamentally different people and almost certainly spoke dif-
ferent languages. But around 5200 BCE, the foragers living around the
Dnieper Rapids began to keep cattle and sheep.

The bands of fishers and hunters whose cemeteries had overlooked the
Rapids since the Early Mesolithic might have been feeling the pinch of
growing populations. Living by the rich resources of the Rapids they might
have become relatively sedentary, and woman, when they live a settled life,
generally have more children. They controlled a well-known, strategic area
in a productive territory. Their decision to adopt cattle and sheep herding
could have opened the way for many others in the Pontic-Caspian steppes.
In the following two or three centuries domesticated cattle, sheep, and
goats were walked and traded from the Dnieper valley eastward to the
Volga-Ural steppes, where they had arrived by about 4700-4600 BCE.
The evidence for any cereal cultivation east of the Dnieper before about
4200 BCE is thin to absent, so the initial innovation seems to have involved
animals and animal herding.

Dating the Shift to Herding

The traditional Neolithic/Eneolithic chronology of the Dnieper valley is
based on several sites near the Dnieper Rapids; the important ones are
Igren 8, Pokhili, and Vovchok, where a repeated stratigraphic sequence was
found. At the bottom were Surskii-type Neolithic pots and microlithic
flint tools associated with the bones of hunted wild animals, principally red

Cows , Copper, and Chiefs 175

deer, wild pigs, and fish. These assemblages defined the Early Neolithic
(dated about 6200-5700 BCE). Above them were Dnieper-Donets phase I
occupations with comb-impressed and vegetal-tempered pottery, still as-
sociated with wild fauna; they defined the Middle Neolithic (probably
about 5700-5400 BCE, contemporary with the Bug-Dniester culture).
Stratified above these deposits were layers with Dnieper-Donets II pottery,
sand-tempered with ‘pricked” or comb-stamped designs, and large flint
blade tools, associated with the bones of domesticated cattle and sheep.
These DDI1 assemblages represented the beginning of the Early Eneolithic
and the beginning of herding economies east of the Dnieper River. 1 3

Unlike the dates from DDI and Surskii, most DDII radiocarbon dates
were measured on human bone from cemeteries. The average level of 15 N in
DDII human bones from the Dnieper valley is 11.8%, suggesting a meat
diet of about 50% fish. Correcting the radiocarbon dates for this level of
15 N, I obtained an age range of 5200—5000 BCE for the oldest DDII
graves at the Yasinovatka and Dereivka cemeteries near the Dnieper Rap-
ids. This is probably about when the DDII culture began. Imported pots of
the late Tripolye A 2 Borisovka type have been found in DDII settlements
at Grini, Piliava, and Stril’cha Skelia in the Dnieper valley, and sherds
from three Tripolye A pots were found at the DDII Nikol’skoe cemetery.
Tripolye A 2 is dated about 4500-4200 BCE by good dates (not on human
bone) in the Tripolye heartland, and late DDII radiocarbon dates (when
corrected for 15 N) agree with this range. The DDII period began about
5200-5000 BCE and lasted until about 4400-4200 BCE. Contact with
Tripolye A people seems to have intensified after about 4500 BCE. 16

The Evidence for Stockbreeding and Grain Cultivation

Four Dnieper-Donets II settlement sites in the Dnieper valley have been
studied by zoologists— Surskii, Sredni Stog 1, and Sobachki in the steppe
zone near the Rapids; and Buz’ki in the moister forest-steppe to the north
(table 9.2). Domesticated cattle, sheep/goat, and pig accounted for 30-75%
of the animal bones in these settlements. Sheep/goat contributed more
than 50% of the bones at Sredni Stog 1 and 26% at Sobachki. Sheep fi-
nally were accepted into the meat diet in the steppes. Perhaps they were
already being plucked for felt making; the vocabulary for wool might have
first appeared among Pre-Proto-Indo-European speakers at about this
time. Wild horses were the most important game (?) animal at Sredni
Stog 1 and Sobachki, whereas red deer, roe deer, wild pig, and beaver were
hunted in the more forested parts of the river at Buz ki and Surskii 2-4.

iy6 Chapter 9

Cows , Copper, and Chiefs 777

Table 9.2

Dnieper-Donets II Animal Bones from Setdements

Sobachki

Sredni Stog 1

Buzki

Mammal Rories

(Bones / MNI)*

Cattle

56/5

23/2

42/3

Sheep/goat

54/8

35/4

3/1

Pig

10/3

1/1

4/1

D°g

9/3

12/1

8/2

Horse

48/4

8/1

Onager

1/1

—

—

Aurochs

2/1

—

—

Red deer

16/3

12/1

16/3

Roe deer

—

—

28/4

Wild pig

3/1

—

27/4

Beaver

—

—

34/5

Other mammal

8/4

—

7/4

Domestic

129 bones / 62%

74 bones / 78%

57 bones / 31%

Wild

78 bones / 38%

20 bones / 22%

126 bones / 69%

*MNI = minimum number of individuals

Fishing net weights and hooks suggest that fish remained important. This
is confirmed by levels of 1 *N in the bones of people who lived on the
Dnieper Rapids, which indicate a meat diet containing more than 50%
fish. Domesticated cattle, pig, and sheep bones occurred in all DDII set-
tlements and in several cemeteries, and constituted more than half the
bones at two settlement sites (Sredni Stog I and Sobachki) in the steppe
zone. Domesticated animals seem indeed to have been an important addi-
tion to the diet around the Dnieper Rapids. 17

Flint blades with sickle gloss attest to the harvesting of cereals at DDII
settlements. But they could have been wild seed plants like Chenopodium
or Amaranthus. If cultivated cereals were harvested there was very little
evidence found. Two impressions of barley ( Hordeum vulgare) were recov-
ered on a potsherd from a DDII settlement site at Vita Litovskaya, near
Kiev, west of the Dnieper. In the forests northwest of Kiev, near the Pripet
marshes, there were sites with pottery that somewhat resembled DDII
pottery but there were no elaborate cemeteries or other traits of the DDII

culture. Some of these settlements (Krushniki, Novosilki, Obolon ) had
pottery with a few seed impressions of wheat (7? monococcum and T. dicoc-
cum) and millet ( Panicum sativum). These sites probably should be dated
before 4500 BCE, since Lengyel-related cultures replaced them in Vol-
hynia and the Polish borderlands after about that date. Some forest-zone
farming seems to have been practiced in the southern Pripet forests west
of the Dnieper. But in steppe-zone DDII cemeteries east of the Dnieper,
Malcolm Lillie recorded almost no dental caries, suggesting that the
DDII people ate a low-carbohydrate diet similar to that of the Mesolithic.
No cultivated cereal imprints have been found east of the Dnieper River in
pots dated before about 4000 BCE. 18

Pottery and Settlement Types

Pottery was more abundant in DDII living sites than it had been in DDI,
and appeared for the first time in cemeteries (figure 9.5). The growing
importance of pottery perhaps implies a more sedentary lifestyle, but shel-
ters were still lightly built and settlements left only faint footprints. A
typical DDII settlement on the Dnieper River was Buz’ki. It consisted of
five hearths and two large heaps of discarded shellfish and animal bones.
No structures were detected, although some kind of shelter probably did
exist. 19 Pots here and in other DDII sites were made in larger sizes (30-
40 cm in diameter) with flat bottoms (pots seen in DDI sites had mainly
pointed or rounded bottoms) and an applied collar around the rim. Deco-
ration usually covered the entire outside of the vessel, made by pricking
the surface with a stick, stamping designs with a small comb-stamp, or
incising thin lines in horizontal-linear and zig-zag motifs — quite different
from the spirals and swirls ofTripolye A potters. Tie application of a “col-
lar” to thicken the rim was a popular innovation, widely adopted across
the Pontic-Caspian steppes about 4800 BCE.

Polished (not chipped) stone axes now became common tools, perhaps
for felling forests, and long unifacial flint blades (5-15 cm long) also be-
came increasingly common, perhaps as a standardized part of a trade or gift
package, since they appeared in graves and in small hoards in settlements.

Dnieper-Donets II Funeral Rituals

DDII funerals were quite different from those of the Mesolithic or Neo-
lithic. The dead usually were exposed, their bones were collected, and they
were finally buried in layers in communal pits. Some individuals were

Figure 9.5 Dnieper-Donets II cemetery at Nikolskoe with funerary ceramics.
Pits A,B,G, and V were in an area deeply stained with red ochre. The other
five burial pits were on a slightly higher elevation. Broken pots and animal
bones were found near the cluster of rocks in the center. After Telegin 1991,
figures 10, 20; and Telegin 1968, figure 27.

Cows , Copper, and Chiefs iyy

buried in the flesh, without exposure. This communal pit type of cemetery,
with several treatments of the body in one pit, spread to other steppe re-
gions. The thirty known DDII communal cemeteries were concentrated
around the Dnieper Rapids but occurred also in other parts of the Dnieper
valley and in the steppes north of the Sea of Azov. The largest cemeter-
ies were three times larger than those of any earlier era, with 173 bodies
at Dereivka, 137 at Nikolskoe, 130 at Vovigny II, 124 at Mariupol, 68 at
Yasinovatka, 50 at Vilnyanka, and so on. Pits contained up to four layers
of burials, some whole and in an extended supine position, others consist-
ing of only skulls. Cemeteries contained up to nine communal burial pits.
Traces of burned structures, perhaps charnel houses built to expose dead
bodies, were detected near the pits at Mariupol and Nikolskoe. At some
cemeteries, including Nikolskoe (figure 9.5), loose human bones were
widely scattered around the burial pits.

At Nikolskoe and Dereivka some layers in the pits contained only
skulls, without mandibles, indicating that some bodies were cleaned to the
bone long before final burial. Other individuals were buried in the flesh,
but the pose suggests that they were tightly wrapped in some kind of
shroud. The first and last graves in the Nikolskoe pits were whole skele-
tons. The standard burial posture for a body buried in the flesh was ex-
tended and supine, with the hands by the sides. Red ochre was densely
strewn over the entire ritual area, inside and outside the grave pits, and
pots and animal bones were broken and discarded near the graves. 20

The funerals at DDII cemeteries were complex events that had several
phases. Some bodies were exposed, and sometimes just their skulls were
buried. In other cases whole bodies were buried. Both variants were placed
together in the same multilayered pits, strewn with powdered red ochre.
The remains of graveside feasts — cattle and horse bones — were thrown in
the red-stained soil at Nikolskoe, and cattle bones were found in grave 38,
pit A, at Vilnyanka. 21 At Nikofskoe almost three thousand sherds of pot-
tery, including three Tripolye A cups, were found among the animal bones
and red ochre deposited over the graves.

Power and Politics

The people of the DDII culture looked different than people of earlier
periods in two significant respects: the profusion of new decorations for
the human body and the clear inequality in their distribution. The old
fisher-gatherers of the Dnieper Rapids were buried wearing, at most, a few
beads of deer or fish teeth. But in DDII cemeteries a few individuals were

I

Figure 9.6 Ornaments and symbols of power in the Early Eneolithic, from
Dnieper-Donets II graves, Khvalynsk, and Varfolomievka. The photo of grave
50 at Mariupol, skull at the top, is adapted from Gimbutas 1956, plate 8. The
beads from Nikol skoe include two copper beads and a copper ring on the left,
and a gold ring on the lower right. The other beads are polished and drilled
stone. The maces from Mariupol and Nikol’skoe, and beads from Nikol’skoe are
after Telegin 1991, figures 29, 38; and Telegin and Potekhina 1987, figure 39.

Cows, Copper, and Chiefs 181

buried with thousands of shell beads, copper and gold ornaments, im-
ported crystal and porphyry ornaments, polished stone maces, bird-bone
tubes, and ornamental plaques made of boars tusk (figure 9.6). Boar’s-tusk
plaques were restricted to very few individuals. The tusks were cut into
rectangular flat pieces (not an easy thing to do), polished smooth, and
pierced or incised for attachment to clothing. They may have been meant
to emulate Tripolye A copper and Spondylus - shell plaques, but DDII chiefs
found their own symbols of power in the tusks of wild boars.

At the Mariupol cemetery 310 (70%) of the 429 boars-tusk plaques
accompanied just 10 (8%) of the 124 individuals. The richest individual
(gr. 8) was buried wearing forty boars-tusk plaques sewn to his thighs and
shirt, and numerous belts made of hundreds of shell and mother-of-pearl
beads. He also had a polished porphyry four-knobbed mace head (figure
9.6), a bull figurine carved from bone, and seven bird-bone tubes. At Ya-
sinovatka, only one of sixty-eight graves had boars-tusk plaques: an adult
male wore nine plaques in grave 45. At Nikol’skoe, a pair of adults (gr. 25
and 26) was laid atop a grave pit (B) equipped with a single boars-tusk
plaque, a polished serpentine mace head, four copper beads, a copper wire
ring, a gold ring, polished slate and jet beads, several flint tools, and an
imported Tripolye A pot. The copper contained trace elements that iden-
tify it as Balkan in origin. Surprisingly few children were buried at Mari-
upol (11 of 124 individuals), suggesting that a selection was made — not all
children who died were buried here. But one was among the richest of all
the graves: he or she (sex is indeterminate in immature skeletons) wore
forty-one boars-tusk plaques, as well as a cap armored with eleven whole
boar’s tusks, and was profusely ornamented with strings of shell and bone
beads. The selection of only a few children, including some who were very
richly ornamented, implies the inheritance of status and wealth. Power
was becoming institutionalized in families that publicly advertised their
elevated status at funerals.

The valuables that signaled status were copper, shell, and imported
stone beads and ornaments; boars-tusk plaques; polished stone mace-
heads; and bird-bone tubes (function unknown). Status also might have
been expressed through the treatment of the body after death (exposed,
burial of the skull/not exposed, burial of the whole body); and by the

Figure 9.6 (< continued ) The Varfolomievka mace (or pestle?) is after Yudin
1988, figure 2; Khvalynsk maces are after Agapov, Vasliev, and Pestrikova
1990, figure 24. Boars-tusk plaques, at the bottom, are after Telegin 1991,
figure 38.

/<£? Chapter 9

public sacrifice of domesticated animals, particularly cattle. Similar mark-
ers of status were adopted across the Pontic-Caspian steppes, from the
Dnieper to the Volga. Boars-tusk plaques with exactly the same flower-
like projection on the upper edge (figure 9.6, top plaque from Yasinovatka)
were found at Yasinovatka in the Dnieper valley and in a grave at Syezzhe
in the Samara valley, 400 km to the east. Ornaments made of Balkan
copper were traded across the Dnieper and appeared on the Volga. Pol-
ished stone mace-heads had different forms in the Dnieper valley
(Nikol’skoe), the middle Volga (Khvalynsk), and the North Caspian region
(Varfolomievka), but a mace is a weapon, and its wide adoption as a symbol
of status suggests a change in the politics of power.

The Khvalynsk Culture on the Volga

The initial spread of stockbreeding in the Pontic-Caspian steppes was
notable for the various responses it provoked. The DDII culture, where
the shift began, incorporated domesticated animals not just as a ritual
currency but also as an important part of the daily diet. Other people re-
acted in quite different ways, but they were all clearly interacting, perhaps
even competing, with one another. A key regional variant was the Khval-
ynsk culture.

A prehistoric cemetery was discovered at Khvalynsk in 1977 on the west
bank of the middle Volga. Threatened by the water impounded behind a
Volga dam, it was excavated by teams led by Igor Vasiliev of Samara (figure
9.7). Its location has since been completely destroyed by bank erosion. Sites
of the Khvalynsk type are now known from the Samara region southward
along the banks of the Volga into the Caspian Depression and the Ryn
Peski desert in the south. The characteristic pottery included open bowls
and bag-like, round-bottomed pots, thick-walled and shell-tempered, with
very distinctive sharply everted thick “collars” around the rims. They were
densely embellished with bands of pricked and comb-stamped decoration
that often covered the entire exterior surface. Early Khvalynsk, well docu-
mented at the Khvalynsk cemetery, began around 4700-4600 BCE in the
middle Volga region (after adjusting the dates downward for the 15 N con-
tent of the humnan bones on which the dates were measured). Late Khval-
ynsk on the lower Volga is dated 3900-3800 BCE at the site of Kara-Khuduk
but probably survived even longer than this on the lower Volga . 22

The first excavation at the Khvalynsk cemetery, in 1977-79 (excavation
I), uncovered 158 graves; the second excavation in 1980-85 (excavation II)
recovered, I have been told, 43 additional graves . 23 Only Khvalynsk I has

Figure 9.7 Khvalynsk cemetery and grave gifts. Grave 90 contained copper
beads and rings, a harpoon, flint blades, and a bird-bone tube. Both graves
(90 and 91) were partly covered by Sacrificial Deposit 4 with the bones from
a horse, a sheep, and a cow.

Center: grave goods from the Khvalynsk cemetery — copper rings and bracelets,
polished stone mace heads, polished stone bracelet, Cardium shell ornaments,
boars tusk chest ornaments, flint blades, and bifiacial projectile points.

Bottom: shell-tempered pottery from the Khvalynsk cemetery. After Agapov,
Vasiliev, and Pestrikova 1990; and Ryndina 1998, Figure 31.

184 Chapter 9

been published, so all statistics here are based on the first 158 graves (fig-
ure 9.7). Khvalynsk was by far the largest excavated Khvalynsk-type cem-
etery; most others had fewer than 10 graves. At Khvalynsk most of the
deceased were layered in group pits, somewhat like DDII graves, but the
groups were much smaller, containing only two to six individuals (perhaps
families) buried on top of one another. One-third of the graves were single
graves, a move away from the communal DDII custom. Only mature
males, aged thirty to fifty, were exposed and disarticulated prior to burial,
probably an expression of enhanced male status, associated with the intro-
duction of herding economies elsewhere in the world. 24 Few children were
buried in the cemetery (13 of 158), but those who were included some of
the most profusely ornamented individuals, again possibly indicating that
status was inherited. The standard burial posture was on the back with the
knees raised, a distinctive pose. Most had their heads to the north and
east, a consistent orientation that was absent in DDII cemeteries. Both the
peculiar posture and the standard orientation later became widespread in
steppe funeral customs.

Khvalynsk had many more animal sacrifices than any DDII cemetery: 52
(or 70) sheep/goat, 23 cattle, and 11 horses, to accompany the burials of 158
humans. (The published reports are inconsistent on the number of sheep/
goat.) The head-and-hoof form of sacrifice appeared for the first time: at
least 17 sheep/goat and 9 cattle were slaughtered and only the skull and
lower leg bones were buried, probably still attached to the animals hide. In
later steppe funerals the custom of hanging a hide containing the head and
hooves over the grave or burying it in the grave was very common. The head
and hide symbolized a gift to the gods, and the flesh was doled out to guests
at the funeral feast. Parts of domesticated animals were offered in all phases
of the funerals at Khvalynsk: on the grave floor, in the grave fill, at the edge
of the grave, and in twelve special sacrificial deposits stained with red ochre,
found above the graves (figure 9.7). The distribution of animal sacrifices was
unequal: 22 graves of 158 (14 percent) had animal sacrifices in the grave or
above it, and enough animals were sacrificed to supply about half of the
graves were they distributed equally. Only 4 graves (100, 127, 139, and 55-
57) contained multiple species (cattle and sheep, sheep and horse, etc.) and
all four of those also were covered by ochre-stained ritual deposits above the
grave, with additional sacrifices. About one in five people had sacrificed
domestic animals, and one in forty had multiple domestic animals.

The role of the horse in the Khvalynsk sacrifices is intriguing. The only
animals sacrificed at Khvalysnk I were domesticated sheep/goat, domesti-
cated cattle, and horses. Horse leg parts occurred by themselves, without

Cows, Copper, and Chiefs 185

other animal bones, in eight graves. They were included with a sheep/goat
head-and-hoof offering in grave 127, and were included with sheep/goat
and cattle remains in sacrificial deposit 4 (figure 9.7). It is not possible to
measure the bones — they were discarded long ago — but horses certainly
were treated symbolically like domesticated animals at Khvalynsk: they
were grouped with cattle and sheep/goat in human funeral rituals that
excluded obviously wild animals. Carved images of horses were found at
other cemeteries dated to this same period (see below). Horses certainly
had a new ritual and symbolic importance at Khvalynsk. If they were
domesticated, they would represent the oldest domesticated horses. 25

There is much more copper at Khvalynsk than is known from the entire
DDII culture, and the copper objects there are truly remarkable (figure
9.7). Unfortunately most of it, an astonishing 286 objects, came from the
43 (?) graves of the Khvalynsk II excavation, still unpublished though
analyses of some of the objects have been published by Natalya Ryndina.
The Khvalynsk I excavation yielded 34 copper objects found in 11 of the
158 published graves. The copper from excavations I and II showed the
same trace elements and technology, the former characteristic of Balkan
copper. Ryndina’s study of 30 objects revealed three technological groups:
14 objects made at 300-500°C, 11 made at 600-800°C, and 5 made at
900-1, 000°C. The quality of welding and forging was uniformly low in
the first two groups, indicating local manufacture, but was strongly influ-
enced by the methods of the Tripolye A culture. The third group, which
included two thin rings and three massive spiral rings, was technically
identical to Old European status objects from the cemeteries of Varna and
Durankulak in Bulgaria. These objects were made in Old Europe and
were traded in finished form to the Volga. In the 158 graves of Khvalynsk
I, adult males had the most copper objects, but the number of graves with
some copper was about equal between the sexes, five adult male graves and
four adult female graves. An adolescent (gr. 90 in figure 9.7) and a child
were also buried with copper rings and beads. 26

Polished stone mace-heads and polished serpentine and steatite stone
bracelets appeared with copper as status symbols. Two polished stone
maces occurred in one adult male grave (gr. 108) and one in another (gr.
57) at Khvalynsk. Grave 108 also contained a polished steatite bracelet.
Similar bracelets and mace-heads were found in other Khvalynsk-culture
cemeteries on the Volga, for example, at Krivoluchie (Samara oblast) and
Khlopkovskii (Saratov oblast). Some mace heads were given “ears” that
made them seem vaguely zoomorphic, and some observers have seen horse
heads in them. A clearly zoomorphic polished stone mace head appeared

186 Chapter 9

at Varfolomievka, part of a different culture group on the lower Volga.
Maces, copper, and elaborate decoration of the body appeared with do-
mesticated animals, not before. 27

Khvalynsk settlements have been found at Gundurovka and Lebya-
zhinka I on the Sok River, north of the Samara. But the Khvalynsk arti-
facts and pottery are mixed with artifacts of other cultures and ages,
making it difficult to isolate features or animal bones that can be ascribed
to the Khvalynsk period alone. We do know from the bones of the Khval-
ynsk people themselves that they ate a lot of fish; with an average l5 N mea-
surement of 14.8%, fish probably represented 70% of their meat diet. Pure
Khvalynsk camps have been found on the lower Volga in the Ryn Peski
desert, but these were specialized hunters’ camps where onagers and saiga
antelope were the quarry, comprising 80-90 percent of the animal bones.
Even here, at Kara Khuduk I, we find a few sheep/goat and cattle bones
(6-9 %), perhaps provisions carried by Khvalynsk hunters.

In garbage dumps found at sites of other steppe cultures of the same
period east of the Don (see below), horse bones usually made up more than
half the bones found, and the percentage of cattle and sheep was usually
under 40%. In the east, cattle and sheep were more important in ritual
sacrifices than in the diet, as if they were initially regarded as a kind of
ritual currency used for occasional (seasonal?) sanctified meals and funeral
feasts. They certainly were associated with new rituals at funerals, and
probably with other new religious beliefs and myths as well. The set of
cults that spread with the first domesticated animals was at the root of the
Proto-Indo-European conception of the universe as described at the
beginning of chapter 8.

Nalchik and North Caucasian Cultures

Many archaeologists have wondered if domesticated cattle and sheep might
have entered the steppes through the Eneolithic farmers of the Caucasus
as well as from Old Europe. 28 Farming cultures had spread from the Near
East into the southern Caucasus Mountains (Shulaveri, Arukhlo, and Shen-
gavit) by 5800-5600 BCE. But these earliest farming communities in the
Caucasus were not widespread; they remained concentrated in a few river-
bottom locations in the upper Kura and Araxes River valleys. No bridging
sites linked them to the distant European steppes, more than 500 km to the
north and west. The permanently glaciated North Caucasus Mountains, the
highest and most impassable mountain range in Europe, stood between
them and the steppes. The bread wheats ( Triticum aestivuni) preferred in the

Cows , Copper \ and Chiefs 187

Caucasus were less tolerant of drought conditions than the hulled wheats
(emmer, einkorn) preferred by Crij, Linear Pottery, and Bug-Dniester culti-
vators. The botanist Zoya Yanushevich observed that the cultivated cereals
that appeared in Bug-Dniester sites and later in the Pontic-Caspian steppe
river valleys were a Balkan/Danubian crop suite, not a Caucasian crop
suite. 29 Nor is there an obvious stylistic connection between the pottery or
artifacts of the earliest Caucasian farmers at Shulaveri and those of the earli-
est herders in the steppes off to the north. If I had to guess at the linguistic
identity of the first Eneolithic farmers at Shulaveri, I would link them with
the ancestors of the Kartvelian language family.

The Northwest Caucasian languages, however, are quite unlike Kartve-
lian. Northwest Caucasian seems to be an isolate, a survival of some unique
language stock native to the northern slopes of the North Caucasus Moun-
tains. In the western part of the North Caucasian piedmont, overlooking
the steppes, the few documented Eneolithic communities had stone tools
and pottery somewhat like those of their northern steppe neighbors; these
communities were southern participants in the steppe world, not northern
extensions of Shulaveri-type Caucasian farmers. I would guess they spoke
languages ancestral to Northwest Caucasian, but only a few early sites are
published. The most important is the cemetery at Nalchik.

Near Nalchik, in the center of the North Caucasus piedmont, was a
cemetery containing 147 graves with contracted skeletons lying on their
sides in red ochre-stained pits in groups of two or three under stone cairns.
Females lay in a contracted pose on the left side and males on their right.

A few copper ornaments, beads made of deer and cattle teeth, and polished
stone bracelets (like those found in grave 108 at Khvalynsk and at Krivo-
luchie) accompanied them. One grave yielded a date on human bone of
5000-4800 BCE (possibly too old by a hundred to five hundred years, if
the dated sample was contaminated by old carbon in fish). Five graves in
the same region at Staronizhesteblievsk were provided with boars-tusk
plaques of the DDII Mariupol type, animal-tooth beads, and flint blades
that seem at home in the Early Eneolithic. 31 An undated cave occupation
in the Kuban valley at Kamennomost Cave, level 2, which could be of the
same date, has yielded sheep/goat and cattle bones stratified beneath a
later level with Maikop-culture materials. Carved stone bracelets and
ornamental stones from the Caucasus — black jet, rock crystal, and
porphyry — were traded into Khvalynsk and Dnieper-Donets II sites, per-
haps from people like those at Nalchik and Kamennomost Cave 2. The
Nalchik-era sites clearly represent a community that had at least a few
domesticated cattle and sheep/goats, and was in contact with Khvalynsk.

188 Chapter g

They probably got their domesticated animals from the Dnieper, as the
Khvalynsk people did.

The Lower Don and North Caspian Steppes

In the steppes between Nalchik and Khvalynsk many more sites, of differ-
ent kinds, are dated to this period. Rakushechni Yar on the lower Don, near
the Sea of Azov, is a deeply stratified settlement site with a cluster of six
graves at the edge of the settlement area. The lowest cultural levels, with
shell-tempered pottery lightly decorated with incised linear motifs and im-
pressions made with a triangular-ended stick, probably dated about 5200-
4800 BCE, contained the bones of sheep/goat and cattle. But in the interior
steppes, away from the major river valleys, equid hunting was still the focus
of the economy. In the North Caspian Depression the forager camp of
Dzhangar, also dated 5200 BCE (on animal bone) and with pottery similar
to Rakushechni Yar, yielded only the bones of wild horses and onagers. 3 ^
On the eastern side of the lower Volga, sites such as Varfolomievka were
interspersed with Khvalynsk hunters’ camps such as Kara Khuduk I. 33 The
settlement at Varfolomievka is stratified and well dated by radiocarbon, and
clearly shows the transition from foraging to herding in the North Caspian
Depression. Varfolomievka was first occupied around 5800-5600 BCE by
pottery-making foragers who hunted onagers and horses (level 3). The site
was reoccupied twice more (levels 2B and 2A). In level 2B, dated about
5200-4800 BCE, people constructed three pit-houses. They used copper
(one copper awl and some amorphous lumps of copper were found) and kept
domesticated sheep/goats, though “almost half” the animal bones at Var-
folomievka were of horses. Bone plaques were carved in the shape of horses,
and horse metacarpals were incised with geometric decorations. Three pol-
ished stone mace-head fragments were found here. One was carved into an
animal head at one end, perhaps a horse (figure 9.6). Pour graves were dug
rather casually into abandoned house depressions at Varfolomievka, like the
similar group of graves at the edge of Rakushechni Yar. Hundreds of beads
made of drilled and polished horse teeth were deposited in ochre-stained
sacrificial deposits near the human graves. There were also a few deer teeth,
several kinds of shell beads, and whole boars’ tusk ornaments.

These sites in the southern steppes, from the lower Don to the lower
Volga, are dated 5200-4600 BCE and exhibit the bones of sheep/goat and
occasionally cattle, small objects of copper, and casual disposal of the
dead. Small settlements provide most of the data, unlike the cemetery-
based archaeological record for Khvalynsk. Pots were shell-tempered and

Cows, Copper, and Chiefs r8g

decorated with designs incised or pricked with a triangular-ended stick.
Motifs included diamond-like lozenges and, rarely, incised meanders filled
with pricked ornament. Most rims were simple but some were thickened
on the inside. A. Yudin has grouped these sites together under the name of
the Orlovka culture, after the settlement of Orlovka, excavated in 1974, on
the Volga. Nalchik seems to have existed at the southern fringe of this
network. 34

The Forest Frontier: The Samara Culture

One other culture interacted with northern Khvalynsk in the middle Volga
region, along the forest-steppe boundary (see figure 9.1). The Samara Neo-
lithic culture, distinguished by its own variety of “collared” pots covered
with pricked, incised, and rocker-stamped motifs, developed at the north-
ern edge of the steppe zone along the Samara River. The pottery, tempered
with sand and crushed plants, was similar to that made on the middle Don
River. Dwellings at Gundurovka near Samara had dug-out floors, 20 m by
8 m, with multiple hearths and storage pits in the floors (this settlement
also contained Khvalynsk pottery). Domesticated sheep/goat (13% of 3,602
bones) and cattle (21%) were identified at Ivanovskaya on the upper Samara
River, although 66% of the bones were of horses. The settlement of Vilova-
toe on the Samara River yielded 552 identifiable bones, of which 28.3%
were horse, 19.4% were sheep/goat, and 6.3% were cattle, in addition to
beaver (31.8%) and red deer (12.9%). The Samara culture showed some
forest-culture traits: it had large polished stone adzes like those of forest
foragers to the north.

Samara people created formal cemeteries (figure 9.8). The cemetery at
S’yezzhe (see-YOZH-yay) contained nine burials in an extended position
on their backs, different from the Khvalynsk position and more like that
of DDII. Above the graves at the level of the original ground surface was
a ritual deposit of red ochre, broken pottery, shell beads, a bone harpoon,
and the skulls and lower leg bones (astragali and phalanges) of two
horses — funeral-feast deposits like the above-grave deposits at Khvalynsk.
S’yezzhe had the oldest horse head-and-hoof deposit in the steppes. Near
the horse head-and-hoof deposit, but outside the area of ochre-stained
soil, were two figurines of horses carved on flat pieces of bone, similar to
others found at Varfolomievka, and one bone figurine of a bull. The
S’yezzhe people wore boar’s-tusk plaques like those of the Dnieper-Donets
II culture, one of which was shaped exactly like one found at the DDII
cemetery of Yasinovatka in the Dnieper valley. 35

igo Chapter 9

Cows, Copper, and Chiefs 191

Bone

Harpoon

EXCAVATED AREA

Grave 6

ochre stained
ancient surface

crushed pots I

Bone Plaque
found along
eroding bank

Figure 9.8 Syezzhe cemetery. Samara oblast. Graves 1-9 were a cemetery of
the Samara culture, Early Eneolithic. Graves 10 and 11 were later. After
Vasiliev and Matveeva 1979.

Cows, Social Power, and the Emergence of Tribes

It is impossible to say how much the people buried at Khvalynsk really
blew of the societies of Old Europe, but they certainly were connected by
a trade network of impressive reach. Cemeteries across the Pontic-Caspian
steppes (DDII, Khvalynsk, Syezzhe, Nalchik) became larger or appeared
for the first time, suggesting the growth of larger, more stable communities.

Cattle and sheep were important in the diet at some DDII settlements on
the Dnieper River, but farther east they seem initially to have been more
important in funeral rituals than in the daily diet, which was still domi-
nated by horse meat. In the east, domesticated cattle and sheep seem to
have served as a kind of currency in a new set of rituals and religious
beliefs.

Participation in long-distance trade, gift exchange, and a new set of
cults requiring public sacrifices and feasting became the foundation for a
new kind of social power. Stockbreeding is by nature a volatile economy.
Herders who lose animals always borrow from those who still have them.
The social obligations associated with these loans are institutionalized
among the world’s pastoralists as the basis for a fluid system of status
distinctions. Those who loaned animals acquired power over those who
borrowed them, and those who sponsored feasts obligated their guests.
Early Proto-Indo-European included a vocabulary about verbal contracts
bound by oaths (* hfitos -), used in later religious rituals to specify the
obligations between the weak (humans) and the strong (gods). Reflexes
of this root were preserved in Celtic, Germanic, Greek, and Tocharian.
The model of political relations it references probably began in the Eneo-
lithic. Only a few Eneolithic steppe people wore the elaborate costumes
of tusks, plaques, beads, and rings or carried the stone maces that sym-
bolized power, but children were included in this exceptional group, sug-
gesting that the rich animal loaners at least tried to see that their children
inherited their status. Status competition between regional leaders *weik-
potis or *reg- in later Proto-Indo-European resulted in a surprisingly
widespread set of shared status symbols. As leaders acquired followers,
political networks emerged around them — and this was the basis for
tribes.

Societies that did not accept the new herding economy became increas-
ingly different from those that did. The people of the northern forest zone
remained foragers, as did those who lived in the steppes east of the Ural
Mountains. These frontiers probably were linguistic as well as economic,
given their persistence and clarity. The Pre-Proto-Indo-European lan-
guage family probably expanded with the new economy during the Early
Eneolithic in the western steppes. Its sister-to-sister linguistic links may
well have facilitated the spread of stockbreeding and the beliefs that went
with it.

One notable aspect of the Pontic-Caspian Early Eneolithic is the im-
portance of horses, in both diet and funeral symbolism. Horse meat was a
major part of the meat diet. Images of horses were carved on bone plaques
at Varfolomievka and Syezzhe. At Khvalynsk, horses were included with

i <)2 Chapter 9

cattle and sheep in funeral rituals that excluded obviously wild animals.
But, zoologically, we cannot say whether they looked very different from
wild horses — the bones no longer exist. The domestication of the horse, an
enormously important event in human history, is not at all well under-
stood. Recently, however, a new kind of evidence has been obtained
straight from the horses mouth.

Chapter Ten

The Domestication of the Horse
and the Origins of Riding
The Tale of the Teeth

The importance of the horse in human history is matched only bv the difficulties
inherent in its study; there is hardly an incident in the story which is not the
subject of controversy, often of a violent nature.

— Grahamc Clark, 1941

In the summer of 1985 I went with my wife Dorcas Brown, a fellow ar-
chaeologist, to the Veterinary School at the University of Pennsylvania to
ask a veterinary surgeon a few questions. Do bits create pathologies on
horse teeth? If they do, then shouldn’t we be able to see the signs of
bitting — scratches or small patches of wear — on ancient horse teeth?
Wouldn’t that be a good way to identify early bitted horses? Could he point
us toward the medical literature on the dental pathologies associated with
horse bits? He replied that there really was no literature on the subject. A
properly bitted horse wearing a well-adjusted bridle, he said, really cant
take the bit in its teeth very easily, so contact between the bit and the teeth
would have been too infrequent to show up with any regularity. Nice idea,
but it wouldn’t work. We decided to get a second opinion.

At the Veterinary School’s New Bolton Center for large mammals, out-
side Philadelphia, the trainers, who worked every day with horses, re-
sponded very differently. Horses chewed their bits all the time, they said.
Some rolled the bit around in their mouths like candy. You could hear it
clacking against their teeth. Of course, it was a vice — properly trained and
harnessed horses were not supposed to do it, but they did. And we should
talk to Hillary Clayton, formerly at New Bolton, who had gone to a uni-
versity job somewhere in Canada. She had been studying the mechanics of
bits in horses’ mouths.

Tftl

ig4 Chapter io

We located Hillary Clayton at the University of Saskatchewan and
found that she had made X-ray fluoroscopic videos of horses chewing bits
(figure 10.1). She bitted horses and manipulated the reins from a standing
position behind. An X-ray fluoroscope mounted beside the horses' heads
took pictures of what was happening inside their mouths. No one had
done this before. She sent us two articles co-authored with colleagues in
Canada. 1 Their images showed just how horses manipulated a bit inside
their mouths and precisely where it sat between their teeth. A well-
positioned bit is supposed to sit on the tongue and gums in the space be-
tween the front and back teeth, called the “bars” of the mouth. When the
rider pulls the reins, the bit presses the tongue and the gums into the
lower jaw, squeezing the sensitive gum tissue between the bit and the un-
derlying bone. That hurts. The horse will dip its head toward a one-sided

Figure 10.1 A modern metal bit in a horses mouth. Mandible bone tinted
gray, (a) jointed snaffle bit; (b) X-ray of jointed snaffle sitting on the tongue in
proper position; (c) X-ray of snaffle being grasped in the teeth; (d) bar bit
showing chewing wear; (e) X-ray of bar bit sitting on the tongue in proper
position; (f) X-ray of bar bit being grasped in the teeth. After Clayton and
Lee 1984; and Clayton 1985.

Domestication of the Horse 795

pull (a turn) or lower its chin into a two-sided pull (a brake) to avoid the
bits pressure on its tongue and gums.

Claytons X-rays showed how horses use their tongues to elevate the bit
and then retract it, pushing it back into the grip of their premolars, where
it can no longer cause pressure on soft tissue no matter how hard the rider
pulls on the reins. The soft corners of the mouth are positioned in front of
the molars, so in order to get a bit into its teeth the horse has to force it
back against the corners of its mouth. These stretched tissues act like a
spring. If the bit is not held very firmly between the tips of the teeth it will
pop forward again onto the bars of the mouth. It seemed likely to us that
this repeated back-and-forth movement over the tips of the front premo-
lars should affect the lower teeth more than the uppers just because of
gravity — the bit sat on the lower jaw. The wear from bit chewing should be
concentrated on one small part of two teeth (the lower second premolars,
or P s), unlike the wear from chewing anything else. Claytons X-rays
made it possible, for the first time, to say positively that a specific part of a
single tooth was the place to look for bit wear. We found several published
photographs of archaeological horse P 2 s with wear facets or bevels on pre-
cisely that spot. Two well-known archaeological zoologists, Juliet Clutton-
Brock in London and Antonio Azzaroli in Rome, had described this kind
of wear as “possibly” made by a bit. Other zoologists thought it was im-
possible for horses to get a bit that far back into their mouth with any
frequency, like our first veterinary surgeon. No one knew for sure. But
they had not seen Clayton's X-rays. 2

Encouraged and excited, we visited the anthropology department at the
Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, and asked Me-
linda Zeder, then a staff archaeozoologist, if we could study some never-
bitted ancient wild horse teeth — a control sample — and if she could offer us
some technical advice about how to proceed. We were not trained as zoolo-
gists, and we did not know much about horse teeth. Zeder and a colleague
who knew a lot about dental microwear, Kate Gordon, sat us down in the
staff cafeteria. How would we distinguish bit wear from tooth irregularities
caused by malocclusion? Or from dietary wear, created by normal chewing
on food? Would the wear caused by a bit survive very long, or would it be
worn away by dietary wear? How long would that take? How fast do horse
teeth grow? Aren't they the kind of teeth that grow out of the jaw and are
worn away at the crown until they become little stubs? Would that change
bit wear facets with increasing age? What about rope or leather bits — prob-
ably the oldest kind? Do they cause wear? What kind? Is the action of the
bit different when a horse is ridden from when it pulls a chariot? And what,

ig 6 Chapter ro

exactly, causes weai^if it exists? Is it the rider pulling the bit into th t front
of the tooth, or is it the horse chewing on the bit, which would cause wear
on the occlusal (chewing) surface of the tooth? Or is it both? And if we did
find wear under the microscope, how would we describe it so that the differ-
ence between a tooth with and without wear could be quantified?

Mindy Zeder took us through her collections. We made our first molds
of ancient equid P,s, from the Bronze Age city of Malyan in Iran, dated
about 2000 BCE. They had wear facets on their mesial corners; later we
would be able to say that the facets were created by a hard bit of bone or
metal. But we didn’t know that yet, and, as turned out, there really was
not a large collection of never-bitted wild horse teeth at the Smithsonian.
We had to find our own, and we left thinking that we could do it if we
took one problem at a time. Twenty years later we still feel that way. 3

Where Were Horses First Domesticated?

Bit wear is important, because other kinds of evidence have proven uncertain
guides to early horse domestication. Genetic evidence, which we might hope
would solve the problem, does not help much. Modern horses are genetically
schizophrenic, like cattle (chapter 8) but with the genders reversed. The fe-
male bloodline of modern domesticated horses shows extreme diversity.
Traits inherited through the mitochondrial DNA, which passes unchanged
from mother to daughter, show that this part of the bloodline is so diverse
that at least seventy-seven ancestral mares, grouped into seventeen phylogene-
tic branches, are required to account for the genetic variety in modern popu-
lations around the globe. Wild mares must have been taken into domesticated
horse herds in many different places at different times. Meanwhile, the male
aspect of modern horse DNA, which is passed unchanged on the Y chromo-
some from sire to colt, shows remarkable homogeneity. It is possible that just
a single wild stallion was domesticated. So horse keepers apparently have felt
free to capture and breed a variety of wild mares, but, according to these
data, they universally rejected wild males and even the male progeny of any
wild stallions that mated with domesticated mares. Modern horses are de-
scended from very few original wild males, and many, varied wild females. 4

Why the Difference?

Wildlife biologists have observed the behavior of feral horse bands in
several places around the world, notably at Askania Nova, Ukraine, on
the barrier islands of Maryland and Virginia (the horses described in the

Domestication of the Horse 197

childrens’ classic Misty of Chincoteague), and in northwestern Nevada.
The standard feral horse band consists of a stallion with a harem of two
to seven mares and their immature offspring. Adolescents leave the band
at about two years of age. Stallion-and-harem bands occupy a home
range, and stallions fight one another, fiercely, for control of mares and
territory. After the young males are expelled they form loose associa-
tions called “bachelor bands,” which lurk at the edges of the home range
of an established stallion. Most bachelors are unable to challenge mature
stallions or keep mares successfully until they are more than five years
old. Within established bands, the mares are arranged in a social hierar-
chy led by the lead mare, who chooses where the band will go during
most of the day and leads it in flight if there is a threat, while the stallion
guards the flanks or the rear. Mares are therefore instinctively disposed
to accept the dominance of others, whether dominant mares, stallions —
or humans. Stallions are headstrong and violent, and are instinctively
disposed to challenge authority by biting and kicking. A relatively docile
and controllable mare could be found at the bottom of the pecking order
in many wild horse bands, but a relatively docile and controllable stallion
was an unusual individual — and one that had little hope of reproducing
in the wild. Horse domestication might have depended on a lucky coin-
cidence: the appearance of a relatively manageable and docile male in a
place where humans could use him as the breeder of a domesticated
bloodline. From the horses perspective, humans were the only way he
could get a girl. From the human perspective, he was the only sire they
wanted.

Where Did He Live? And When?

Animal domestication, like marriage, is the culmination of a long prior
relationship. People would not invest the time and energy to attempt to
care for an animal they were unfamiliar with. The first people to think
seriously about the benefits of keeping, feeding, and raising tame horses
must have been familiar with wild horses. They must have lived in a place
where humans spent a lot of time hunting wild horses and learning their
behavior. The part of the world where this was possible contracted signifi-
cantly about ten thousand to fourteen thousand years ago, when the Ice
Age steppe — a favorable environment for horses — was replaced by dense
forest over much of the Northern Hemisphere. The horses of North Amer-
ica became extinct as the climate shifted, for reasons still poorly under-
stood. In Europe and Asia large herds of wild horses survived only in the

ig8 Chapter io

Figure 10.2 Map of the distribution of wild horses ( Equus caballus) in the
mid-Holocene, about 5000 BCE. The numbers show the approximate fre-
quencies of horse bones in human kitchen garbage in each region, derived
from charts in Benecke 1994 and from various Russian sources.

steppes in the center of the Eurasian continent, leaving smaller popula-
tions isolated in pockets of naturally open pasture (marsh-grass meadows,
alpine meadows, arid mesetas) in Europe, central Anatolia (modern Tur-
key), and the Caucasus Mountains. Horses disappeared from Iran, low-
land Mesopotamia, and the Fertile Crescent, leaving these warm regions
to other equids (onagers and asses) (figure 10.2).

In western and central Europe, central Anatolia, and the Caucasus
the isolated pockets of horses that survived into the Holocene never
became important in the human food quest — there just weren’t enough
of them. In Anatolia, for example, a few wild horses probably were
hunted occasionally by the Neolithic occupants of Catal Huyok,
Pinarba^i, and other farming villages in the central plateau region be-
tween about /400 and 6200 BCE. But most of the equids hunted at
these sites were Equus hydruntinus (now extinct) or Equus hemionus (on-
agers), both ass-like equids smaller than horses. Only a few bones are
large enough to qualify as possible horses. Horses were not present in
Neolithic sites in western Anatolia, or in Greece or Bulgaria, or in the

Domestication of the Horse iqq

Mesolithic and Early Neolithic of Austria, Hungary, or southern Po-
land. In western and northern Europe, Mesolithic foragers hunted horses
occasionally. But horse bones accounted for more than 5% of the ani-
mals in only a few post-Glacial sites in the coastal plain of Germany/
Poland and in the uplands of southern France. In the Eurasian steppes,
on the other hand, wild horses and related wild equids (onagers, E. hy-
druntinus) were the most common wild grazing animals. In early Holo-
cene steppe archaeological sites (Mesolithic and early Neolithic) wild
horses regularly account for more than 40% of the animal bones, and
probably more than 40% of the meat diet because horses are so big and
meaty. For this reason alone we should look first to the Eurasian steppes
for the earliest episode of domestication, the one that probably gave us
our modern male bloodline. 5

Early and middle Holocene archaeological sites in the Pontic-Caspian
steppes contain the bones of three species of equids. In the Caspian
Depression, at Mesolithic sites such as Burovaya 53, Je-Kalgan, and
Istai IV, garbage dumps dated before 5500 BCE contain almost exclu-
sively the bones of horses and onagers (see site map, figure 8.3). The
onager, Equus hemionus, also called a “hemione” or “half-ass,” was a
fleet-footed, long-eared animal smaller than a horse and larger than an
ass. The natural range of the onager extended from the Caspian steppes
across Central Asia and Iran and into the Near East. A second equid,
Equus hydruntinus, was hunted in the slightly moister North Pontic
steppes in Ukraine, where its bones occur in small percentages in Meso-
lithic and Early Neolithic components at Girzhevo and Matveev Kur-
gan, dated to the late seventh millennium BCE. This small, gracile
animal, which then lived from the Black Sea steppes westward into
Bulgaria and Romania and south into Anatolia, became extinct before
3000 BCE. The true horse, Equus caballus, ranged across both the
Caspian Depression and the Black Sea steppes, and it survived in both
environments long after both E. hemionus and E. hydruntinus were
hunted out. Horse bones contributed more than 50% of the identified
animal bones at Late Mesolithic Girzhevo in the Dniester steppes and
Meso/Neolithic Matveev Kurgan and Kammenaya Mogila in the Azov
steppes; also at Neo/Eneolithic Varfolomievka and Dzhangar in the
Caspian Depression, Ivanovskaya on the Samara River, and Mullino in
the southern foothills of the Ural Mountains. The long history of hu-
man dependence on wild equids in the steppes created a familiarity
with their habits that would later make the domestication of the horse
possible. 6

200 Chapter io

Why Were Horses Domesticated?

The earliest evidence for possible horse domestication in the Pontic-
Caspian steppes appeared after 4800 BCE, long after sheep, goats, pigs,
and cattle were domesticated in other parts of the world. What was the
incentive to tame wild horses if people already had cattle and sheep? Was
it for transportation? Almost certainly not. Horses were large, powerful,
aggressive animals, more inclined to flee or fight than to carry a human.
Riding probably developed only after horses were already familiar as do-
mesticated animals that could be controlled. Tie initial incentive probably
was the desire for a cheap source of winter meat.

Horses are easier to feed through the winter than cattle or sheep, as
cattle and sheep push snow aside with their noses and horses use their
hard hooves. Sheep can graze on winter grass through soft snow, but if the
snow becomes crusted with ice than their noses will get raw and bloody,
and they will stand and starve in a field where there is ample winter forage
just beneath their feet. Cattle do not forage through even soft snow if they
cannot see the grass, so a snow deep enough to hide the winter grass will
kill range cattle if they are not given fodder. Neither cattle nor sheep will
break the ice on frozen water to drink. Horses have the instinct to break
through ice and crusted snow with their hooves, not their noses, even in
deep snows where the grass cannot be seen. They paw frozen snow away
and teed themselves and so do not need water or fodder. In 1245 the Fran-
ciscan John of Plano Carpini journeyed to Mongolia to meet Giiyiik Khan
(the successor to Genghis) and observed the steppe horses of the Tartars,
as he called them, digging for grass from under the snow, “since the Tar-
tars have neither straw nor hay nor fodder.” During the historic blizzard of
1886 in the North American Plains hundreds of thousands of cattle were
lost on the open range. Those that survived followed herds of mustangs
and grazed in the areas they opened up/ Horses are supremely well
adapted to the cold grasslands where they evolved. People who lived in
cold grasslands with domesticated cattle and sheep would soon have seen
the advantage in keeping horses for meat, just because the horses did not
need fodder or water. A shift to colder climatic conditions or even a par-
ticularly cold series of winters could have made cattle herders think seri-
ously about domesticating horses. Just such a shift to colder winters
occurred between about 4200 and 3800 BCE (see chapter 11).

Cattle herders would have been particularly well suited to manage
horses because cattle and horse bands both follow the lead of a dominant

Domestication of the Horse 201

female. Cowherds already knew they needed only to control the lead cow
to control the whole herd, and would easily have transferred that knowl-
edge to controlling lead mares. Males presented a similar management
problem in both species, and they had the same iconic status as symbols of
virility and strength. When people who depended on equid-hunting be-
gan to keep domesticated cattle, someone would soon have noticed these
similarities and applied cattle-management techniques to wild horses.
And that would quickly have produced the earliest domesticated horses.

This earliest phase of horse keeping, when horses were primarily a recal-
citrant but convenient source of winter meat, may have begun as early as
4800 BCE in the Pontic-Caspian steppes. This was when, at Khvalynsk
and S yezzhe in the middle Volga region, and Nikolskoe on the Dnieper
Rapids, horse heads and/or lower legs were first joined with the heads
and/or lower legs of cattle and sheep in human funeral rituals; and when
bone carvings of horses appeared with carvings of cattle in a few sites like
S yezzhe and Varfolomievka. Certainly horses were linked symbolically
with humans and the cultured world of domesticated animals by 4800
BCE. Horse keeping would have added yet another element to the burst
of economic, ritual, decorative, and political innovations that swept across
the western steppes with the initial spread of stockbreeding about 5200-
4800 BCE.

What Is a Domesticated Horse?

We decided to investigate bit wear on horse teeth, because it is difficult to
distinguish the bones of early domesticated horses from those ol their wild
cousins. The Russian zoologist V. Bibikova tried to define a domesticated
skull type in 1967, but her small sample of horse skulls did not define a
reliable type for most zoologists.

The bones of wild animals usually are distinguished trom those of do-
mesticated animals by two quantifiable measurements: measurements of
variability in size, and counts of the ages and sexes of butchered animals.
Other criteria include finding animals far outside their natural range and
detecting domestication-related pathologies, of which bit wear is an ex-
ample. Crib biting, a stall-chewing vice of bored horses, might cause an-
other domestication-related pathology on the incisor teeth of horses kept
in stalls, but it has not been studied systematically. Marsha Levine of the
McDonald Institute at Cambridge University has examined riding-
related pathologies in vertebrae, but vertebrae are difficult to study. They
break and rot easily, their frequency is low in most archaeological samples,

Domestication of the Horse 20J

202 Chapter io

and only eight caudal thoracic vertebrae (Tll-18) are known to exhibit
pathologies from riding. Discussions of horse domestication still tend to
focus on the first two methods. 8

The Size-Variability Method

The size-variability method depends on two assumptions: (1) domesti-
cated populations, because they are protected, should contain a wider va-
riety of sizes and statures that survive to adulthood, or more variability ;
and (2) the average size of the domesticated population as a whole should
decline, because penning, control of movement, and a restricted diet should
reduce average stature . Measurements of leg bones (principally the width of
the condyle and shaft) are used to look for these patterns. This method
seems to work quite well with the leg bones of cattle and sheep: an increase
in variability and reduction in average size does apparently identify do-
mesticated cattle and sheep.

But the underlying assumptions are not known to apply to the earliest
domesticated horses. American Indians controlled their horses not in a
corral but with a “hobble” (a short rope tied between the two front legs,
permitting a walk but not a run). The principal advantage of early horse
keeping — its low cost in labor — could be realized only if horses were per-
mitted to forage for themselves. Pens and corrals would defeat this pur-
pose. Domesticated horses living and grazing in the same environment
with their wild cousins probably would not show a reduction in size, and
might not show an increase in variability. These changes could be expected
if and when horses were restricted to shelters and fed fodder over the win-
ter, like cattle and sheep were, or when they were separated into different
herds that were managed and trained differently, for example, for riding,
chariot teams, or meat and milk production.

During the earliest phase of horse domestication, when horses were
free-ranging and kept for their meat, any size reductions caused by human
control probably would have been obscured by natural variations in size
between different regional wild populations. The scattered wild horses liv-
ing in central and western Europe were smaller than the horses that lived
in the steppes. In figure 10.3, the three bars on the left of the graph repre-
sent wild horses from Ice Age and Early Neolithic Germany. They were
quite small. Bars 4 and 5 represent wild horses from forest-steppe and
steppe-edge regions, which were significantly bigger. The horses from De-
reivka, in the central steppes of Ukraine, were bigger still; 75% stood
between 133 and 137 cm at the withers, or between 13 and 14 hands. The

Figure 10.3 The size-variability method for identifying the bones of domesti-
cated horses. The box-and-whisker graphs show the thickness of the leg bones
for thirteen archaeological horse populations, with the oldest sites (Paleolithic)
on the left and the youngest (Late Bronze Age) on the right. The whiskers,
showing the extreme measurements, are most affected by sample size and so
are unreliable indicators of population variability. The white boxes, showing
two standard deviations from the mean, are reliable indicators of variability,
and it is these that are usually compared. The increase in this measurement of
variability in bar 10 is taken as evidence for the beginning of horse domestica-
tion. After Benecke and von den Dreisch 2003, figures 6.7 and 6.8 combined.

horses of Botai in northern Kazakhstan were even bigger, often over 14
hands. West-east movements of horse populations could cause changes in
their average sizes, without any human interference. This leaves an in-
crease in variability as the only indicator of domestication during the ear-
liest phase. And variability is very sensitive to sample size — the larger the
sample of bones, the better the chance of finding very small and very large
individuals — so changes in variability alone are difficult to separate from
sample-size effects.

The domestication of the horse is dated about 2500 BCE by the size-
variability method. The earliest site that shows both a significant

204 Chapter io

decrease in average size and an increase in variability is the Bell Beaker
settlement of Csepel-Haros in Hungary, represented by bar 10 in figure
10.3, and dated about 2500 BCE. Subsequently many sites in Europe
and the steppes show a similar pattern. The absence of these statistical
indicators at Dereivka in Ukraine, dated about 4200-3700 BCE (see
chapter 11), and at Botai-culture sites in northern Kazakhstan, dated
about 3700-3000 BCE, are widely accepted as evidence that horses were
not domesticated before about 2500 BCE. But marked regional size dif-
ferences among early wild horses, the sensitivity of variability measure-
ments to sample size effects, and the basic question of the applicability of
these methods to the earliest domesticated horses are three reasons to
look at other kinds of evidence. The appearance of significant new vari-
ability in horse herds after 2500 BCE could reflect the later development
of specialized breeds and functions, not the earliest domestication. 9

Age-at-Death Statistics

The second quantifiable method is the study of the ages and sexes of butch-
ered animals. The animals selected for slaughter from a domesticated herd
should be different ages and sexes from those obtained by hunting. Herders
would probably cull young males as soon as they reached adult meat weight,
at about two to three years of age. A site occupied by horse herders might
contain very few obviously male horses, since the eruption of the canine
teeth in males, the principal marker of gender in horse bones, happens at
about age four or five, after the age when the males should have been
slaughtered for food. Females should have been kept alive as breeders, up to
ten years old or more. In contrast, hunters prey on the most predictable ele-
ments of a wild herd, so they would concentrate their efforts on the stan-
dard wild horse social group, the stallion-with-harem bands, which move
along well-worn paths and trails within a defined territory. Regular hunt-
ing of stallion-with-harem bands would yield a small number of prime
stallions (six to nine years old) and a large number of breeding-age females
(three to ten years old) and their immature young. 10

But many other hunting and culling patterns are possible, and might be
superimposed on one another in a long-used settlement site. Also, only a
tew bones in a horses body indicate sex — a mature male (more than five
years old) has canine teeth whereas females usually do not, and the pelvis
of a mature female is distinctive. Horse jaws with the canines still embed-
ded are not often preserved, so data on gender are spotty. Age is estimated
based on molar teeth, which preserve well, so the sample for age estimation

Domestication of the Horse 205

usually is bigger. But assigning a precise age to a loose horse molar, not
found in the jaw, is difficult, and teeth are often found loose in archaeo-
logical sites. We had to invent a way to narrow down the very broad range
of ages that could be assigned to each tooth. Further, teeth are part of the
head, and heads may receive special treatment. If the goal of the analysis is
to determine which horses were culled for food, heads are not necessarily
the most direct indicators of the human diet. If the occupants of the site
kept and used the heads of prime-age stallions for rituals, the teeth found
in the site would reflect that, and not culling for food. 11

Marsha Levine studied age and sex data at Dereivka in Ukraine (4200-
3700 BCE) and Botai in northern Kazakhstan (3700-3000 BCE), two
critical sites for the study of horse domestication in the steppes. She con-
cluded that the horses at both sites were wild. At Dereivka the majority of
the teeth were from animals whose ages clustered between five and seven
years old, and fourteen of the sixteen mandibles were from mature males. 12
This suggested that most of the horse heads at Dereivka came from prime-
age stallions, not the butchering pattern expected for a managed popula-
tion. But, in fact, it is an odd pattern for a hunted population as well. Why
would hunters kill only prime stallions? Levine suggested that the De-
reivka hunters had stalked wild horse bands, drawing the attention of the
stallions, which were killed when they advanced to protect their harems.
But stalking in the open steppe is probably the least productive way for a
pedestrian hunter to attack a wild horse band, as stallions are more likely
to alarm their band and run away than to approach a predator. Pedestrian
hunters should have used ambush methods, shooting at short range on a
habitually used horse trail. Moreover, the odd stallion-centered slaughter
pattern of Dereivka closely matches the slaughter pattern at the Roman
military cemetery at Kestren, the Netherlands (figure 10.4), where the
horses certainly were domesticated. At Botai, in contrast, the age-and-sex
profile matched what would be expected if whole wild herds were slaugh-
tered en masse, with no selection for age or sex. The two profiles were
dissimilar, yet Levine concluded that horses were wild at both places. Age
and sex profiles are open to many different interpretations.

If it is difficult to distinguish wild from domesticated horses, it is doubly
problematic to distinguish the bones of a mount from those of a horse
merely eaten for dinner. Riding leaves few traces on horse bones. But a bit
leaves marks on the teeth, and teeth usually survive very well. Bits are
used only to guide horses from behind, to drive or to ride. They are not
used if the horse is pulled from the front, as a packhorse is, as this would
just pull the bit out of the mouth. Thus bit wear on the teeth indicates

Domestication of the Horse 207

206 Chapter 10

Age Structure

Dereivka (Der) and Kesteren (Ker) Roman

Figure 10.4 The age-at-death method for identifying the bones of
domesticated horses. This graph compares the age-at-death statistics
for Late Eneolithic horses from Dereivka, Ukraine, to domesticated
horses from the Roman site of Kesteren, Netherlands. The two
graphs are strikingly similar, but one is interpreted as a “wild” profile
and the other is “domesticated.” After Levine 1999, figure 2.21.

riding or driving. The absence of bit wear means nothing, since other forms
of control (nosebands, hackamores) might leave no evidence. But its pres-
ence is an unmistakable sign of riding or driving. That is why we pursued
it. Bit wear could be the smoking gun in the long argument over the ori-
gins of horseback riding and, by extension, in debates over the domestica-
tion of the horse.

Bit Wear and Horseback Riding

After Brown and I left the Smithsonian in 1985 we spent several years
gathering a collection of horse lower second premolars (P^s), the teeth
most affected by bit chewing. Eventually we collected 139 P 2 s from 72
modern horses. Forty were domesticated horses processed through veteri-
nary autopsy labs at the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell Univer-
sity. All had been bitted with modern metal bits. We obtained information
on their age, sex, and usage — hunting, leisure, driving, racing, or draft —
and for some horses we even knew how often they had been bitted, and
with what kind of bit. Thirteen additional horses came from the Horse

Training and Behavior program at the State University of New York at
Cobleskill. Some had never been bitted. We made casts of their teeth in
their mouths, much as a dentist makes an impression to fit a crown — we
think that we were the first people to do this to a living horse. A few feral
horses, never bitted, were obtained from the Atlantic barrier island of As-
sateague, MD. Their bleached bones and teeth were found by Ron Keiper
of Penn State, who regularly followed and studied the Assateague horses
and generously gave us what he had found. Sixteen Nevada mustangs,
killed in 1988 by ranchers, supplied most of our never-bitted P 2 s. I read
about the event, made several telephone calls, and was able to get their
mandibles from the Bureau of Land Management after the kill sites were
documented. Many years later, in a separate study, Christian George at
the University of Florida applied our methods to 113 more never-bitted
P 2 s from a minimum of 58 fossil equids 1.5 million years old. These ani-
mals, of the species Equus “leidyi, ” were excavated from a Pleistocene de-
posit near Leisey, Florida. Georges Leisey equids (the same size, diet, and
dentition as modern horses) had never seen a human, much less a bit. 13

We studied high-resolution casts or replicas of all the P 2 s under a Scan-
ning Electron Microscope (SEM). The SEM revealed that the vice of bit
chewing was amazingly widely practiced (figure 10.5). More than 90% of
the bitted horses showed some wear on their P 2 s from chewing the bit,
often just on one side. Their bits also showed wear from being chewed.
Riding creates the same wear as driving, because it is not the rider or
driver who creates bit wear — it is the horse grasping and releasing the bit
between its teeth. A metal bit or even a bone bit creates distinctive micro-
scopic abrasions on the occlusal enamel of the tooth, usually confined to
the first or metaconid cusp, but extending back to the second cusp in many
cases. These abrasions (type “a” wear, in our terminology) are easily identi-
fied under a microscope. All bits, whether hard (metal or bone) or soft
(rope or leather) also create a second kind of wear: a wear facet or bevel on
the front (mesial) corner of the tooth. The facet is caused both by direct
pressure (particularly with a hard bit of bone or metal), which weakens
and cracks the enamel when the bit is squeezed repeatedly between the
teeth; and by the bit slipping back and forth over the front or mesial corner
of the P v Metal bits create both kinds of wear: abrasions on the occlusal
enamel and wear facets on the mesial corner of the tooth. But rope bits
probably were the earliest kind. Can a rope bit alone create visible wear on
the enamel of horse teeth?

With a grant from the National Science Foundation and the coopera-
tion of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Cobleskill we acquired

I

208 Chapter io

i

Modern feral horse with no bit wear

Modern domestic horse with metal bit wear

)

OCCLUSAL

SURFACE

1 1 5 K U XI 3 0036 1000 .0U MSC35

Lingual

Profile

OCCLUSAL

SURFACE

no bevel

1

Figure 10.5 Bit wear and no wear on the lower second premolars (P 2 s) of
modern horses.

Left: a Scanning Electron Micrograph (SEM) taken at 13x of “a-wear” abra-
sions on the first cusp of a domesticated horse that was bitted with a metal bit.
The profile shows a 3.5 mm bevel or facet on the same cusp.

Right: An SEM taken at 15x of the smooth surface of the first cusp of a feral
horse from Nevada, never bitted. The profile shows a 90° angle with no
bevel.

four horses that had never been bitted. They were kept and ridden at
SUNY Cobleskill, which has a Horse Training and Behavior Program
and a thirty-five-horse stable. They ate only hay and pasture, no soft
feeds, to mimic the natural dental wear of free-range horses. Each horse
was ridden with a different organic bit — leather, horsehair rope, hemp
rope, or bone — for 150 hours, or 600 hours of riding for all four horses.
The horse with the horsehair rope bit was bitted by tying the rope
around its lower jaw in the classic “war bridle” of the Plains Indians, yet

Figure 10.6 Brown and Anthony removing a high-resolution mold of the
P 2 of a horse bitted with an organic bit at State University of New York,
Cobleskill, in 1992.

it was still able to loosen the loop with its tongue and chew the rope. The
other horses’ bits were kept in place by antler cheek-pieces made with
flint tools. At four intervals each horse was anaesthetized by a bemused
veterinarian, and we propped open its mouth, brushed its teeth, dried
them, pulled its tongue to the side, and made molds of its P 2 s (figure
10.6). We tracked the progress of bit wear over time, and noted the dif-
ferences between the wear made by the bone bit (hard) and the leather
and rope bits (soft). 14

The riding experiment demonstrated that soft bits do create bit wear.
The actual cause of wear might have been microscopic grit trapped in and
under the bit, since all the soft bits were made of materials softer than
enamel. After 150 hours of riding, bits made of leather and rope wore
away about 1 mm of enamel on the first cusp of the P 2 (figure 10.7). The
mean bevel measurement for the three horses with rope or leather bits at
the end of the experiment was more than 2 standard deviations greater
than the pre-experiment mean. 1 ^ The rope and leather mouthpieces stood
up well to chewing, although the horse with the hemp rope bit chewed
through it several times. The horses bitted with soft bits showed the same

2io Chapter 10

Domestication of the Horse 211

ACTUAL RESULTS PROJECTED RESULTS
for 1 50 hours riding for 300 hours riding

Table 10.1

Bevel Measurements on the P 2 s of Bitted and Never-Bitted Mature (>3yr) Horses

Never- Bitted,
Feral and Domestic
(16 horses / 31 teeth)

Pleistocene
Leisey equids
(44 h. / 74t.)

Domestic

Bitted

(39 h. / 73 t.)

Domestic
Bitted Daily
(13 h. / 24 1.)

Median

0.5 mm

1.1 mm

2.5 mm

4.0 mm

Mean

0.79 mm

1.1 mm

3.11 mm

3.6 mm

Standard Deviation

0.63 mm

0.71 mm

1.93 mm

1.61 mm

Range

0-2 mm

0-2.9 mm

0-10 mm

1-7 mm

wear facet on the same part of the P 2 as horses bitted with metal and bone
bits, but the surface of the facet was microscopically smooth and polished,
not abraded. Hard bits, including our experimental bone bit, create dis-
tinctive “a” wear on the occlusal enamel of the facet, but soft bits do not.
Soft bit wear is best identified by measuring the depth of the wear facet or
bevel on the P,, not by looking for abrasions on its surface.

Table 10.1 shows bevel measurements for modern horses that never
were bitted (left column); Pleistocene North American equids that never
were bitted (center left column); domestic horses that were bitted, includ-
ing some that were bitted infrequently (center right column); and a smaller
sub-group of domestic horses that were bitted at least five times a week
up to the day we made molds of their teeth (right column). Measurements
of the depth of the wear facet easily distinguished the 73 teeth of bitted
horses from the 105 teeth of never-bitted horses. The never-bitted/bitted
means are different at better than the .001 level of significance. The never-
bitted/daily-bitted means are more than 4 standard deviations apart. Bevel
measurements segregate mature bitted from mature never-bitted horses, as
populations . 16

We set a bevel measurement of 3.0 mm as the minimum threshold for
recognizing bit wear on archaeological horse teeth (figure 10.8). More than
half of our occasionally bitted teeth did not exhibit a bevel measuring as
much as 3 mm . But all horses in our sample with a bevel of 3 mm or more

Figure 10.7 Graph showing the increase in bevel measurements in millime-
ters caused by organic bits over 150 hours of riding, with projections of mea-
surements if riding had continued for 300 hours.

Bevel measurements in mm

212 Chapter 10

0 5 10 15 20 25

Age in Years

Figure 10.8 From our 1998 data: bevel measurements of never bitted, occa-
sionally bitted, and frequently bitted horse teeth plotted against age. All
domesticated horses had precisely known ages; all feral horses were aged by
examining entire mandibles with intact incisor teeth. The line excludes feral
horses and horses aged <3yr. and includes only bitted horses. After Brown
and Anthony 1998.

had been bitted. So the last question was, how adequate was our sample?
Could a 3 mm -wear facet occur naturally on a wild horse P 7 , caused by
malocclusion? Criticisms of bit wear have centered on this problem. 17

Very young horses with newly erupted permanent premolars do dis-
play natural dips and rises on their teeth. New permanent premolars are
uneven because they have not yet been worn flat by occlusion with the

Domestication of the Horse 2 ij

opposing tooth. We had to exclude the teeth of horses two to three years
old for that reason. But among the 105 measurable P 2 s from mature
equids that had never been bitted, Pleistocene to modern, we found that
a “natural” bevel measurement of more than 2.0 mm is unusual (less
than 3% of teeth), and a bevel of 2.5 mm is exceedingly rare (less than
1%). Only one of the 105 never-bitted teeth had a bevel measurement
greater than 2.5 mm — a single tooth from the Leisey equids with a me-
sial bevel of 2.9 mm (the next-nearest bevel was 2.34 mm). In contrast,
bevels of 2.5 mm and more occurred in 58% of the teeth of mature
horses that were bitted. 18

A bevel of 3 mm or more on the P 2 of a mature horse is evidence for ei-
ther an exceedingly rare malocclusion or a very common effect of bitting. If
even one mature horse from an archaeological site shows a bevel >3 mm bit
wear is suggested, but is not a closed case. If multiple mature horses from a
single site show mesial bevel measurements of 3 mm or more, they probably
were bitted. I should stress that our method depends on the accurate mea-
surement of a very small feature — a bevel or facet just a few millimeters
deep. According to our measurements on 178 P, teeth of mature equids the
difference between a 2 mm and a 3 mm bevel is extremely important. In
any discussion of bit wear, precise measurements are required and young
animals must be eliminated. But until someone finds a population of mature
wild horses that displays many P 2 teeth with bevels >3 mm , bit wear as we
have defined it indicates that a horse has been ridden or driven. 19

Indo-European Migrations and Bit Wear at Dereivka

Many archaeologists and historians in the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury thought that horses were first domesticated by Indo-European-
speaking peoples, often specifically characterized as Aryans, who also
were credited with inventing the horse-drawn chariot. This fascination
with the Aryans, or Ariomania, to use Peter Raulwings term, dominated
the study of horseback riding and chariots before World War II. 20

In 1964 Dimitri Telegin discovered the head-and-hoof bones of a
seven- to eight-year-old stallion buried together with the remains of two
dogs at Dereivka in Ukraine, apparently a cultic deposit of some kind (see
figure 11.9). The Dereivka settlement contained three excavated struc-
tures of the Sredni Stog culture and the bones of a great many horses,
63% of the bones found. Ten radiocarbon dates placed the Sredni Stog
settlement about 4200-3700 BCE, after the Dnieper-Donets II and
Early Khvalynsk era. V. I. Bibikova, the chief paleozoologist at the Kiev

2i4 Chapter io

Domestication of the Horse 215

Institute of Archaeology, declared the stallion a domesticated horse in
1967. The respected Hungarian zoologist and head of the Hungarian In-
stitute of Archaeology, Sandor Bokonyi, agreed, noting the great vari-
ably in the leg dimensions of the Dereivka horses. The German zoologist
G. Nobis also agreed. During the late 1960s and 1970s horse domestication
at Dereivka was widely accepted. 21

For Marija Gimbutas of UCLA, the domesticated horses at Dereivka
were part of the evidence which proved that horse-riding, Indo-
European-speaking w Kurgan-culture” pastoralists had migrated in sev-
eral waves out of the steppes between 4200 and 3200 BCE, destroying
the world of egalitarian peace and beauty that she imagined for the Eneo-
lithic cultures of Old Europe. But the idea of Indo-European migrations
sweeping westward out of the steppes was not accepted by most Western
archaeologists, who were increasingly suspicious of any migration-based
explanation for culture change. During the 1980s Gimbutas’s scenario of
massive “Kurgan-culture” invasions into eastern and central Europe was
largely discredited, notably by the German archaeologist A. Hausler. Jim
Mallory’s 1989 masterful review of Indo-European archaeology retained
Gimbutas’s steppe homeland and her three waves as periods of increased
movement in and around the steppes, but he was much less optimistic
about linking specific archaeological cultures with specific migrations
by specific Indo-European branches. Others, myself included, criticized
both Gimbutas’s archaeology and Bibikova’s interpretation of the De-
reivka horses. In 1990 Marsha Levine seemed to nail the coffin shut on
the horse-riding, Kurgan-culture invasion hypothesis when she declared
the horse age and sex ratios at Dereivka to be consistent with a wild,
hunted population. 22

Brown and I visited the Institute of Zoology in Kiev in 1989, the year
after Levine, learning of her trip only after we arrived. With the cheer-
ful help of Natalya Belan, a senior zoologist, we made molds of dozens
of horse P 2 s from many archaeological sites in Ukraine. We examined
one P-, from Early Eneolithic Varfolomievka in the Caspian Depression
(no wear), one from the Tripolye A settlement of Luka Vrublevetskaya
(no wear), several from Mesolithic and Paleolithic sites in Ukraine (no
wear), many from Scythian and Roman-era graves (a lot of bit wear,
some of it extreme), and those of the cult stallion and four other horse
P 0 s from Dereivka. As soon as we saw the Dereivka cult stallion we
knew it had bit wear. Its P 9 s had bevels of 3.5 mm and 4 mm , and the
enamel on the first cusp was deeply abraded. Given its stratigraphic po-
sition at the base of a Late Eneolithic cultural level almost 1 m deep,
dated by ten radiocarbon dates to 4200-3700 BCE, the cult stallion

should have been about two thousand years older than the previously
known oldest evidence for horseback riding. Only four other P 2 s still
survived in the Dereivka collection: two deciduous teeth from horses
less than 2.5 years old (not measurable), and two others from adult
horses but with no bit wear. So our case rested on a single horse. But it
was very clear wear — surprisingly similar to modern metal bit wear. In
1991 we published articles in Scientific American and in the British jour-
nal Antiquity announcing the discovery of bit wear at Dereivka. Levine’s
conclusion that the Dereivka horses were wild had been published just
the year before. Briefly we were too elated to worry about the argument
that would follow. 23

It began when A. Hausler challenged us at a conference in Berlin in
1992. He did not think the Dereivka stallion was Eneolithic or cultic; he
deemed it a Medieval garbage deposit, denying there was evidence for a
horse cult anywhere in the steppes during the Eneolithic. That the wear
looked like metal bit wear was part of the problem, since a metal bit was
improbable in the Eneolithic. Hausler’s target was bigger than bit wear or
even horse domestication: he had dedicated much of his career to refuting
Gimbutas’s “Kurgan-culture” migrations and the entire notion of a steppe
Indo-European homeland. 24 The horses at Dereivka were just a small
piece in a larger controversy. But criticisms like his forced us to obtain a
direct date on the skull itself.

Telegin first sent us a bone sample from the same excavation square
and level as the stallion. It yielded a date between 90 BCE and 70 BCE
(OxA 6577), our first indication of a problem. He obtained another
anomalous radiocarbon date, ca. 3000 BCE, on a piece of bone that, like
our first sample, seems not to have been from the stallion itself (Ki
5488). Finally, he sent us one of the bit-worn P 2 s from the cult stallion.
The Oxford radiocarbon laboratory obtained a date of 410-200 BCE
from this tooth (OxA 7185). Simultaneously the Kiev radiocarbon labo-
ratory obtained a date of 790-520 BCE on a piece of bone from the skull
(Ki 6962). Together these two samples suggest a date between 800 and
200 BCE.

Tie stallion-and-dog deposit at Dereivka was of the Scythian era. No
wonder it had metal bit wear — so did many other Scythian horse teeth. It
had been placed in a pit dug into the Eneolithic settlement between 800 and
200 BCE. The archaeologists who excavated this part of the site in 1964 did
not see the intrusive pit. In 2000, nine years after our initial publication in
Antiquity , we published another Antiquity article retracting the early date for
bit wear at Dereivka. We were disappointed, but by then Dereivka was no
longer the only prehistoric site in the steppes with bit wear. 2 ^

Figure 10.9 Horse-related sites of Eneolithic or older age in the western and
central Eurasian steppes. The steppe ecological zone is enclosed in dashed
lines.

( 1 ) Moliukhor Bugor; ( 2 ) Dereivka; (3) Mariupol; (4) Matveev Kurgan;
(5) Girzhcvo; ( 6 ) Kair Shak; (7) Dzhangar; ( 8 ) Orlovka; ( 9 ) Varfolomievka;
( 10 ) Khvalynsk; ( 11 ) Syezzhe; ( 12 ) Tersek; (13) Botai

Botai and Eneolithic Horseback Riding

The oldest horse P 2 s showing wear facets of 3 mm and more are from the
Botai and Tersek cultures of northern Kazakhstan (figure 10 . 9 ). Exca-
vated through the 1980s by Victor Zaibert, Botai was a settlement of
specialized hunters who rode horses to hunt horses, a peculiar kind of
economy that existed only between 3700 and 3000 BCE, and only in the
steppes of northern Kazakhstan. Sites of the Botai type, east of the
Ishim River, and of the related Tersek type, west of the Ishim, contain

Domestication of the Horse 21 7

Figure 10.10 A concentration of horse bones in an excavated house pit at the
Botai settlement in north-central Kazakhstan, dated about 3700-3000 BCE.
Archaeozoologist Lubomir Peske takes measurements during an interna-
tional conference held in Kazakhstan in 1995 “Early Horsckeepers of the
Eurasian Steppe 4500-1500 BC.” Photo by Asko Parpola.

65-99.9%/horse bones. Botai had more than 150 house-pits (figure 10.10)
and 300,000 animal bones, 99.9% of them horse. A partial list of the other
species represented at Botai (primarily by isolated teeth and phalanges)
includes a very large bovid, probably bison but perhaps aurochs, as well
as elk, red deer, roe deer, boar, bear, beaver, saiga antelope, and gazelle.
Horses, not the easiest prey for people on foot, were overwhelmingly pre-
ferred over these animals . 26

We visited Zaiberts lab in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, in 1992, again
unaware that Marsha Levine had arrived the year before. Among the
forty-two P 2 s we examined from Botai, nineteen were acceptable for study
(many had heavily damaged surfaces, and others were from horses younger
than three years old). Five of these nineteen teeth, representing at least
three different horses, had significant bevel measurements: two 3 mm, one
3.5 mm, one 4 mm, and one 6 mm . Wear facets on undamaged portions
of the Botai P 2 s were polished smooth, the same kind of polish created by
“soft” bits in our experiment. Tie five teeth were found in different places
across the settlement — they did not come from a single intrusive pit. Tie

218 Chapter io

Domestication of the Horse 219

BOTAI #37
general provenience

BOTAI #21 BOTAI #2

BL 815 /general BL 1803 no. 18

70-90cm

~T 370mm 4.0mm^ |

I \ bevel bevel I '

Figure 10.11 Three horse P 2 s with bit wear from the Botai settlement. The
photos show extensive postmortem damage to the occlusal surfaces. The un-
damaged middle tooth showed smooth enamel surfaces but had a significant
wear facet, like a horse ridden with a “soft” bit of rope or leather.

proportion of P 2 s exhibiting bit wear at Botai was 12% of the entire sample
of P 2 S provided, or 26% of the nineteen measurable P 2 s. Either number
was just too high to explain by appealing to a rare natural malocclusion
(figure 10.11). We also examined the horse P 2 s from a Tersek site, Kozhai
1, dated to the same period, 3700-3000 bce. At Kozhai 1 horses ac-
counted for 66.1% of seventy thousand identified animal bones (others
were saiga antelope at 21.8%, onager at 9.4%, and bison, perhaps includ-
ing some very large domesticated cattle, at 2.1%). We found a 3 mm wear
facet on two P 2 s of the twelve we examined from Kozhai 1. Most of the
P 2 s at Botai and Kozhai 1 did not exhibit bit wear, but a small percentage
(12-26%) did, consistent with the interpretation that the Botai-Tersek
people were mounted horse hunters. 27

Botai attracted the attention of everyone interested in early horse
domestication. Two field excavations by Western archaeologists (Mar-
sha Levine and Sandra Olsen) have occurred at Botai or Botai-culture
sites. The original excavator, Victor Zaibert, the Kazakh zoologist L.A.

Makarova, and the American archaeozoologist Sandra Olsen of the Carn-
egie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh all concluded that at least
some of the Botai horses were domesticated. In opposition, the archaeo-
zoologists N. M. Ermolova, Marsha Levine, and the German team Nor-
bert Benecke and Angela von den Dreisch concluded that all the Botai
horses were wild. 28 Levine found some pathologies in the Botai vertebrae
but attributed them to age. Benecke and von den Dreisch showed that the
Botai horses exhibited a narrow range of variability in size, like Paleolithic
wild populations. The ages and sexes of the Botai horses were typical of a
wild population, with a 1:1 ratio between the sexes, including all age
groups, even colts and pregnant mares with gestating fetuses. Everyone
agrees that whole herds of wild horses were killed by the Botai people, us-
ing herd-driving hunting techniques that had never been used before in
the Kazakh steppes, certainly not on this scale. Were the hunters riding or
on foot? Native American hunters on foot drove bison herds over cliffs
before the introduction of horses to the Americas by Europeans, so herd
driving was possible without riding.

Sandra Olsen of the Carnegie Museum concluded that at least some
Botai horses were used for transport, because whole horse carcasses were
butchered regularly over the course of several centuries in the settlement at
Botai. 29 How would pedestrian hunters drag eight-hundred-pound car-
casses to the settlement, not just once or twice but as a regular practice
that continued for centuries? Pedestrian hunters who used herd-driving
hunting methods in the European Paleolithic at Solutre (where Olsen
had worked earlier) and in the North American Plains butchered large
animals where they died at the kill site. But the Botai settlement is lo-
cated on the open, south-facing slope of a broad ridge top in a steppe
environment — wild horses could not have been trapped in the settlement.
Either some horses were tamed and could be led into the settlement or
horses were used to drag whole carcasses of killed animals into the settle-
ment, perhaps on sleds. Olsen’s interpretation was supported by soil anal-
ysis from a house pit at Botai (Olsen’s excavation 32) that revealed a
distinct layer of soil filled with horse dung. This “must have been the re-
sult of redeposition of material from stabling layers,” according to the soil
scientists who examined it. 30 This dung-rich soil was removed from a
horse stable or corral. The stabling of horses at Botai obviously suggests
domestication.

One more argument for horseback riding is that the slaughter of wild
populations with a 1:1 sex ratio could only be achieved by sweeping up
both stallion-with-harem bands and bachelor bands, and these two kinds

220 Chapter 10

of social groups normally live far apart in the wild. If stallion-with-harem
bands were driven into traps, the female:male ratio would be more than
2:1. The only way to capture both bachelor bands and harem bands in herd
drives is to actively search and sweep up all the wild horses in a very large
region. That would be impossible on foot.

Finally, the beginning of horseback riding provides a good explanation
for the economic and cultural changes that appeared with the Botai-
Tersek cultures. Before 3700 BCE foragers in the northern Kazkah steppes
lived in small groups at temporary lakeside camps such as Vinogradovka
XIV in Kokchetav district and Tel’manskie in Tselinograd district. Their
remains are assigned to the Atbasar Neolithic. 31 They hunted horses but
also a variety of other game: short-horned bison, saiga antelope, gazelle,
and red deer. The details of their foraging economy are unclear, as their
camp sites were small and ephemeral and have yielded relatively few ani-
mal bones. Around 3700-3500 BCE they shifted to specialized horse
hunting, started to use herd-driving hunting methods, and began to ag-
gregate in large settlements — a new hunting strategy and a new settle-
ment pattern. The number of animal bones deposited at each settlement
rose to tens or even hundreds of thousands. Their stone tools changed
from microlithic tool kits to large bifacial blades. They began to make
large polished stone weights with central perforations, probably for manu-
facturing multi-stranded rawhide ropes (weights are hung from each
strand as the strands are twisted together). Rawhide thong manufacture
was one of the principal activities Olsen identified at Botai based on bone
tool microwear. For the first time the foragers of the northern Kazakh
steppes demonstrated the ability to drive and trap whole herds of horses
and transport their carcasses into new, large communal settlements. No
explanation other than the adoption of horseback riding has been offered
for these changes.

The case for horse management and riding at Botai and Kozhai 1 is
based on the presence of bit wear on seven Botai-Tersek horse P-,s from
two different sites, carcass transport and butchering practices, the discov-
ery of horse-dung-filled stable soils, a 1:1 sex ratio, and changes in econ-
omy and settlement pattern consistent with the beginning of riding. The
case against riding is based on the low variability in leg thickness and the
absence of riding-related pathologies in a small sample of horse vertebrae,
possibly from wild hunted horses, which probably made up 75-90% of the
horse bones at Botai. We are reasonably certain that horses were bitted
and ridden in northern Kazakhstan beginning about 3700-3500 BCE.

Domestication of the Horse 221

The Origin of Horseback Riding

Horseback riding probably did not begin in northern Kazakhstan. The
Botai-Tersek people were mounted foragers. A few domesticated cattle
(?) bones might be found in some Tersek sites, but there were none in
Botai sites, farther east; and neither had sheep. 32 It is likely that Botai-
Tersek people acquired the idea of domesticated animal management
from their western neighbors, who had been managing domesticated
cattle and sheep, and probably horses, for a thousand years before 3700-
3500 BCE.

The evidence for riding at Botai is not isolated. Perhaps the most inter-
esting parallel from beyond the steppes is a case of severe wear on a mesial
horse P 2 with a bevel much deeper than 3 mm , on a five-year-old stallion
jaw excavated from Late Chalcolithic levels at Mokhrablur in Armenia,
dated 4000-3500 BCE. This looks like another case of early bit wear per-
haps even older than Botai, but we have not examined it for confirma-
tion. 33 Also, after about 3500 BCE horses began to appear in greater
numbers or appeared regularly for the first time outside the Pontic-Caspian
steppes. Between 3500 and 3000 BCE horses began to show up regularly
in settlements of the Maikop and Early Transcaucasian Culture (ETC) in
the Caucasus, and also for the first time in the lower and middle Danube
valley in settlements of the Cernavoda III and Baden-Boieraz cultures
as at Cernavoda and Ketegyhaza. Around 3000 BCE horse bones rose to
about 10-20% of the bones in Bernberg sites in central Germany and to
more than 20% of the bones at the Cham site of Galgenberg in Bavaria.
The Galgenburg horses included a native small type and a larger type
probably imported from the steppes. This general increase in the impor-
tance of horses from Kazakhstan to the Caucasus, the Danube valley, and
Germany after 3500 BCE suggests a significant change in the relationship
between humans and horses. Botai and lersek show what that change
was: people had started to ride. 34

Over the long term it would have been very difficult to manage horse
herds without riding them. Anywhere that we see a sustained, long-term
dependence on domesticated horses, riding is implied for herd manage
ment alone. Riding began in the Pontic-Caspian steppes before 3700
BCE, or before the Botai-Tersek culture appeared in the Kazakh steppes.
It may well have started before 4200 BCE. It spread outside the Pontic-
Caspian steppes between 3700 and 3000 BCE, as shown by increases in

222 Chapter io

horse bones in southeastern Europe, central Europe, the Caucasus, and
northern Kazakhstan.

The Economic and Military Effects
of Horseback Riding

A person on foot can herd about two hundred sheep with a good herding
dog. On horseback, with the same dog, that single person can herd about
five hundred. 35 Riding greatly increased the efficiency and therefore the
scale and productivity of herding in the Eurasian grasslands. More cattle
and sheep could be owned and controlled by riders than by pedestrian
herders, which permitted a greater accumulation of animal wealth. Larger
herds, of course, required larger pastures, and the desire for larger pastures
would have caused a general renegotiation of tribal frontiers, a series of
boundary conflicts. Victory in tribal warfare depended largely on forging
alliances and mobilizing larger forces than your enemy, and so intensified
warfare stimulated efforts to build alliances through feasts and the redis-
tribution of wealth. Gifts were effective both in building alliances before
conflicts and in sealing agreements after them. An increase in boundary
conflicts would thus have encouraged more long-distance trade to acquire
prestigious goods, as well as elaborate feasts and public ceremonies to forge
alliances. This early phase of conflict, caused partly by herding on horseback,
might be visible archaeologically in the horizon of polished stone mace-
heads and body decorations (copper, gold, boars-tusk, and shell ornaments)
that spread across the western steppes with the earliest herding economies
about 5000-4200 BCE. 36

Horses were valuable and easily stolen, and riding increased the effi-
ciency of stealing cattle. When American Indians in the North American
Plains first began to ride, chronic horse-stealing raids soured relationships
even between tribes that had been friendly. Riding also was an excellent
way to retreat quickly; often the most dangerous part of tribal raiding on
foot was the running retreat after a raid. Eneolithic war parties might
have left their horses under guard and attacked on foot, as many American
Indians did in the early decades of horse warfare in the Plains. But even if
horses were used for nothing more than transportation to and from the
raid, the rapidity and reach of mounted raiders would have changed raid-
ing tactics, status-seeking behaviors, alliance-building, displays of wealth,
and settlement patterns. Thus riding cannot be cleanly separated from
warfare. 37

Domestication of the Horse 22 j

Many experts have suggested that horses were not ridden in warfare
until after about 1500-1000 BCE, but they failed to differentiate between
mounted raiding, which probably is very old, and cavalry , which was in-
vented in the Iron Age after about 1000 BCE. 38 Eneolithic tribal herders
probably rode horses in inter-clan raids before 4000 BCE, but they were
not like the Huns sweeping out of the steppes on armies of shaggy horses.
What is intriguing about the Huns and their more ancient cousins, the
Scythians, was that they formed armies. During the Iron Age the Scyth-
ians, essentially tribal in most other aspects of their political organization,
became organized in their military operations like the formal armies of
urban states. That required a change in ideology — how a warrior thought
about himself, his role, and his responsibilities — as well as in the technol-
ogy of mounted warfare — how weapons were used from horseback. Prob-
ably the change in weapons came first.

Mounted archery probably was not yet very effective before the Iron
Age, for three reasons. The bows reconstructed from their traces in steppe
Bronze Age graves were more than 1 m long and up to 1.5 m, or almost
five feet, in length, which would clearly have made them clumsy to use
from horseback; the arrowheads were chipped from flint or made from
bone in widely varying sizes and weights, implying a nonstandardized,
individualized array of arrow lengths and weights; and, finally, the bases
of most arrowheads were made to fit into a hollow or split shaft, which
weakened the arrow or required a separate hollow foreshaft for the attach-
ment of the point. The more powerful the bow, and the higher the impact
on striking a target, the more likely the arrow was to split, if the shaft had
already been split to secure the point. Stemmed and triangular flint points,
common before the Iron Age, were made to be inserted into a separate
foreshaft with a hollow socket made of reed or wood (for stemmed points),
or were set into a split shaft (for triangular points). The long bows, irregu-
lar arrow sizes, and less-than-optimal attachments between points and
arrows together reduced the military effectiveness of early mounted ar-
chery. Before the Iron Age mounted raiders could harass tribal war bands,
disrupt harvests in farming villages, or steal cattle, but that is not the same
as defeating a disciplined army. Tribal raiding by small groups of riders in
eastern Europe did not pose a threat to walled cities in Mesopotamia, and
so was ignored by the kings and generals of the Near East and the eastern
Mediterranean. 39

The invention of the short, recurved, compound bow (the “cupid ’ bow)
around 1000 BCE made it possible for riders to carry a powerful bow
short enough to swing over the horse s rear. For the first time arrows could

224 Chapter io

be fired behind the rider with penetrating power. This maneuver, later
known as the “Parthian shot,” was immortalized as the iconic image of the
steppe archer. Cast bronze socketed arrowheads of standard weights and
sizes also appeared in the Early Iron Age. A socketed arrowhead did not
require a split-shaft mount, so arrows with socketed arrowheads did not
split despite the power of the bow; they also did not need a separate fore-
shaft, and so arrows could be simpler and more streamlined. Reusable
moulds were invented so that smiths could produce hundreds of socketed
arrowheads of standard weight and size. Archers now had a much wider
field of fire — to the rear, the front, and the left — and could carry dozens of
standardized arrows. An army of mounted archers could now fill the sky
with arrows that struck with killing power. 40

But organizing an army of mounted archers was not a simple matter.
The technical advances in bows, arrows, and casting were meaningless
without a matching change in mentality, in the identity of the fighter,
from a heroic single warrior to a nameless soldier. An ideological model
of fighting appropriate for a state had to be grafted onto the mentality of
tribal horseback riders. Pre-Iron-Age warfare in the Eurasian steppes,
from what we can glean from sources like the Iliad and the Rig Veda , prob-
ably emphasized personal glory and heroism. Tribal warfare generally was
conducted by forces that never drilled as a unit, often could choose to ig-
nore their leaders, and valued personal bravery above following orders. 41
In contrast, the tactics and ideology of state warfare depended on large
disciplined units of anonymous soldiers who obeyed a general. These tac-
tics, and the soldier mentality that went with them, were not applied to
riders before 1000 BCE, partly because the short bows and standardized
arrows that would make mounted archery truly threatening had not yet
been invented. As mounted archers gained in firepower, someone on the
edge of the civilized world began to organize them into armies. That
seems to have occurred about 1000—900 BCE. Cavalry soon swept chari-
otry from the battlefield, and a new era in warfare began. But it would be
grossly inappropriate to apply that later model of mounted warfare to the
Eneolithic.

Riding began in the region identified as the Proto-Indo-European
homeland. To understand how riding affected the spread of Indo-European
languages we have to pick up the thread of the archaeological narrative
that ended in chapter 9.

Chapter Eleven

The End of Old Europe and the Rise of the Steppe

By 4300-4200 BCE Old Europe was at its peak. The Varna cemetery in
eastern Bulgaria had the most ostentatious funerals in the world, richer
than anything of the same age in the Near East. Among the 281 graves at
Varna, 61 (22%) contained more than three thousand golden objects to-
gether weighing 6 kg (13.2 lb). Two thousand of these were found in just
four graves (1, 4, 36, and 43). Grave 43, an adult male, had golden beads,
armrings, and rings totaling 1,516 grams (3.37 lb), including a copper axe-
adze with a gold-sheathed handle. 1 Golden ornaments have also been
found in tell settlements in the lower Danube valley, at Gumelnita, Vidra,
and at Hotnitsa (a 310-gm cache of golden ornaments). A few men in
these communities played prominent social roles as chiefs or clan leaders,
symbolized by the public display of shining gold ornaments and cast cop-
per weapons.

Thousands of settlements with broadly similar ceramics, houses, and fe-
male figurines were occupied between about 4500 and 4100 BCE in east-
ern Bulgaria (Varna), the upland plains of Balkan Thrace (KaranovoVI),
the upper part of the Lower Danube valley in western Bulgaria and Roma-
nia (Krivodol-Salcuta), and the broad riverine plains of the lower Danube
valley (Gumelnita) (figure 11.1). Beautifully painted ceramic vessels, some
almost 1 m tall and fired at temperatures of over 800 C, lined the walls
of their two-storied houses. Conventions in ceramic design and ritual were
shared over large regions. The crafts of metallurgy, ceramics, and even flint
working became so refined that they must have required master craft spe-
cialists who were patronized and supported by chiefs. In spite of this,
power was not obviously centralized in any one village. Perhaps, as John
Chapman observed, it was a time when the restricted resources (gold, cop-
per, Spondy/us shell) were not critical, and the critical resources (land, tim-
ber, labor, marriage partners) were not seriously restricted. This could have
prevented any one region or town from dominating others. 2

79C

226 Chapter n

UKRAINE

Tripo/ye

Sabatinovka

•Polivanov Yar
DragusenTSs

A/aiwarovka VIII

'Gucuten/

• Habasesti

Karbunar

\#Drutsy

HUNGRY

Tiszapolgar >
JCulture

( Mure} J

Bolgrad

fAriusd

•Mirnoe

Aldeni

Sitagroi®

POLAND

\Gumelnitsa ?•

9 \ V" Durankulak

[ i \ Qnntf^ Podooritsa •) ^

Galatin/F sh # *

„ • J Hotnitsa 00

Krivodol-^ 777,71

\ 6ALK AN_Mts : c

-T\\ •Karanovo \ C = copper

r -Vnnafrcito \ . _ : _ _

source

11.1 Map of Old Europe at 4500-4000 BCE.

End of Old Europe 227

Towns in the high plains atop the Balkans and in the fertile lower Dan-
ube valley formed high tells. Settlements fixed in one place for so long imply
fixed agricultural fields and a rigid system of land tenure around each tell.
The settlement on level VI at Karanovo in the Balkans was the type site for
the period. About fifty houses crowded together in orderly rows inside a
protective wooden palisade wall atop a massive 12-m (40-ft) tell. Many tells
were surrounded by substantial towns. At Bereket, not far from Karanovo,
the central part of the tell was 250 m in diameter and had cultural deposits
17.5 m (57 ft) thick, but even 300-600 m away from this central eminence
the occupation deposits were 1-3 m thick. Surveys at Podgoritsa in north-
eastern Bulgaria also found substantial off-tell settlement. 3

Around 4200-4100 BCE the climate began to shift, an event called the
Piora Oscillation in studies of Swiss alpine glaciers. Solar insolation de-
creased, glaciers advanced in the Alps (which gave this episode its name),
and winters became much colder. 4 Variations in temperature in the north-
ern hemisphere are recorded in the annual growth rings in oaks preserved
in bogs in Germany and in annual ice layers in the GISP2 glacial ice core
from Greenland. According to these sources, extremely cold years hap-
pened first in 4120 and 4040 BCE. They were harbingers of a 140-year-
long, bitterly cold period lasting from 3960 to 3821 BCE, with temperatures
colder than at any time in the previous two thousand years. Investigations
led by Douglass Bailey in the lower Danube valley showed that floods
occurred more frequently and erosion degraded the riverine floodplains
where crops were grown. Agriculture in the lower Danube valley shifted
to more cold-tolerant rye in some settlements. 5 Quickly these and perhaps
other stresses accumulated to create an enormous crisis.

Between about 4200 and 3900 BCE more than six hundred tell settle-
ments of the Gumelnita, Karanovo VI, and Varna cultures were burned
and abandoned in the lower Danube valley and eastern Bulgaria. Some of
their residents dispersed temporarily into smaller villages like the Gumelnita
B1 hamlet ofjilava, southwest of Bucharest, with just five to six houses and
a single-level cultural deposit. But Jilava was burned, apparently suddenly,
leaving behind whole pots and many other artifacts. 6 People scattered and
became much more mobile, depending for their food on herds of sheep and
cattle rather than fixed fields of grain. The forests did not regenerate; in
fact, pollen cores show that the countryside became even more open and
deforested. 7 Relatively mild climatic conditions returned after 3760 BCE
according to the German oaks, but by then the cultures of the lower Dan-
ube valley and the Balkans had changed dramatically. The cultures that
appeared after about 3800 BCE did not regularly use female figurines in

228 Chapter //

domestic rituals, no longer wore copper spiral bracelets or Spondylus - shell
ornaments, made relatively plain pottery in a limited number of shapes, did
not live on tells, and depended more on stockbreeding. Metallurgy, min-
ing, and ceramic technology declined sharply in both volume and technical
skill, and ceramics and metal objects changed markedly in style. The cop-
per mines in the Balkans abruptly ceased production; copper-using cultures
in central Europe and the Carpathians switched to Transylvanian and
Hungarian ores about 4000 BCE, at the beginning of the Bodrogkeresztur
culture in Hungary (see ore sources in figure 11.1). Oddly this was when
metallurgy really began in western Hungary and nearby in Austria and
central Europe. 8 Metal objects now were made using new arsenical bronze
alloys, and were of new types, including new weapons, daggers being the
most important. “We are faced with the complete replacement of a cul-
ture,” the foremost expert on Eneolithic metallurgy E. N. Chernykh said.
It was “a catastrophe of colossal scope ... a complete cultural caesura,” ac-
cording to the Bulgarian archaeologist H. Todorova. 9

The end of Old Europe truncated a tradition that began with the
Starcevo-Cri§ pioneers in 6200 BCE. Exactly what happened to Old Eu-
rope is the subject of a long, vigorous debate. Graves of the Suvorovo type,
ascribed to immigrants from the steppes, appeared in the lower Danube
valley just before the destruction of the tells. Settlements of the Cernavoda
I type appeared just after. They regularly contain horse bones and ceramics
exhibiting a mixture of steppe technology and indigenous Danubian shapes,
and are ascribed to a mixed population of steppe immigrants and people
from the tells. The number of abandoned sites and the rapid termination
of many long-standing traditions in crafts, domestic rituals, decorative
customs, body ornaments, housing styles, living arrangements, and econ-
omy suggest not a gradual evolution but an abrupt and probably violent
end. At Hotnitsa on the Danube in north-central Bulgaria the burned
houses of the final Eneolithic occupation contained human skeletons, in-
terpreted as massacred inhabitants. The final Eneolithic destruction level
at Yunatsite on the Balkan upland plain contained forty-six human skele-
tons. It looks like the tell towns of Old Europe fell to warfare, and, some-
how, immigrants from the steppes were involved. But the primary causes
of the crisis could have included climate change and related agricultural
failures, or soil erosion and environmental degradation accumulated from
centuries of intensive farming, or internecine warfare over declining tim-
ber and copper resources, or a combination of all these. 10

The crisis did not immediately affect all of southeastern Europe. The most
widespread settlement abandonments occurred in the lower Danube valley

End of Old Europe 229

(Gumelnita, northeastern Bulgaria, and the Bolgrad group), in eastern
Bulgaria (Varna and related cultures), and in the mountain valleys of the
Balkans (Karanovo VI), east of the Yantra River in Bulgaria and the Olt in
Romania. This was where tell settlements, and the stable field systems they
imply, were most common. In the Balkans, a well-cultivated, densely popu-
lated landscape occupied since the earliest Neolithic, no permanent settle-
ments can be dated between 3800 and 3300 BCE. People probably still
lived there, but herds of sheep grazed on the abandoned tells.

The traditions of Old Europe survived longer in western Bulgaria and
western Romania (Krivodol-Salcufa IV-Bubanj Hum lb). Here the settle-
ment system had always been somewhat more flexible and less rooted; the
sites of western Bulgaria usually did not form high tells. Old European
ceramic types, house types, and figurine types were abandoned gradually
during Salcuta IV, 4000-3500 BCE. Settlements that were occupied dur-
ing the crisis, places like Telish-Redutite III and Galatin, moved to high,
steep-sided promontories, but they retained mud-brick architecture, two-
story houses, and cult and temple buildings. 11 Many caves in the region
were newly occupied, and since herders often use upland caves for shelter,
this might suggest an increase in upland-lowland seasonal migrations by
herders. The Krivodol-Salcutsa-Bubanj Hum lb people reoriented their
external trade and exchange connections to the north and west, where
their influence can be seen on the Lasinja-Balaton culture in western
Hungary.

The Old European traditions of the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture also sur-
vived and, in fact, seemed curiously reinvigorated. After 4000 BCE, in its
Tripolye B2 phase, the Tripolye culture expanded eastward toward the
Dnieper valley, creating ever larger agricultural towns, although none was
rebuilt in one place long enough to form a tell. Domestic cults still used
female figurines, and potters still made brightly painted fine lidded pots
and storage jars 1 m high. Painted fine ceramics were mass-produced in
the largest towns (Varvarovka VIII), and flint tools were mass-produced
at flint-mining villages like Polivanov Yar on the Dniester. 12 Cucuteni
AB/Tripolye B2 settlements such as Veseli Kut (150 ha) contained hun-
dreds of houses and apparently were preeminent places in a new settle-
ment hierarchy. The Cucuteni-Tripolye culture forged new relationships
with the copper-using cultures of eastern Hungary (Borogkeresztur) in
the west and with the tribes of the steppes in the east.

The languages spoken by those steppe tribes, around 4000 BCE, prob-
ably included archaic Proto-Indo-European dialects of the kind partly
preserved later in Anatolian. The steppe people who spoke in that way

End of Old Europe 2 ji

2jo Chapter n

probably already rode horses. Were the Suvorovo sites in the lower Dan-
ube valley created by Indo-European invaders on horseback? Did they
play a role in the destruction of the tell settlements of the lower Danube
valley, as Gimbutas suggested? Or did they just slip into an opening cre-
ated by climate change and agricultural failures? In either case, why did
the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture survive and even prosper? To address these
questions we first have to examine the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture and its
relations with steppe cultures.

Warfare and Alliance: The Cucuteni-Tripolye
Culture and the Steppes

The crisis in the lower Danube valley corresponded to late Cucuteni A3/
Tripolye Bl, around 4300-4000 BCE. Tripolye B1 was marked by a steep
increase in the construction of fortifications — ditches and earthen banks —
to protect settlements (figure 11.2). Fortifications might have appeared
just about when the climate began to deteriorate and the collapse of Old
Europe occurred, but Cucuteni-Tripolye fortifications then decreased dur-
ing the coldest years of the Piora Oscillation, during Tripolye B2, 4000-
3700 BCE. If climate change destabilized Old Europe and caused the
initial construction of Cucuteni-Tripolye fortifications, the first phase of
change was sufficient by itself to tip the system into crisis. Probably there
was more to it than just climate.

Only 10% of Tripolye Bl settlements were fortified even in the worst of
times. But those that were fortified required substantial labor, implying
a serious, chronic threat. Fortified Cucteni-Tripolye villages usually were
built at the end of a steep-sided promontory, protected by a ditch dug across
the promontory neck. The ditches were 2-5 m wide and 1.5-3 m deep, made
by removing 500-1,500 m 3 of earth. They were relocated and deepened as
settlements grew in size, as at Traian and Haba$e§ti I. In a database of 2,017
Cucuteni/Tripolye settlements compiled by the Moldovan archaeologist
V. Dergachev, half of #// fortified Cucuteni/Tripolye sites are dated just to
the Tripolye Bl period. About 60% of all the flint projectile points from
all the Cucuteni/Tripolye culture also belonged just to the Tripolye Bl
period. There was no corresponding increase in hunting during Tripolye
Bl (no increase in wild animal bones in settlements), and so the high fre-
quency of projectile points was not connected with hunting. Probably it
was associated with increased warfare.

The number of Cucuteni-Tripolye settlements increased from about 35
settlements per century during Tripolye A to about 340 (!) during Tripolye

Fissure 11.2 Habasesti I, a fortified Tripolye Bl village. After Chernysh
1982.

Bl, a tenfold rise in the number of settlements without a significant expan-
sion of the area settled (figure 11.3b). 13 Part of this increase in settlement
density during Tripolye Bl might be ascribed to refugees fleeing from the
towns of the Gumelnita culture. At least one Tripolye Bl settlement in the
Prut drainage, Drutsy 1, appears to have been attacked. More than one
hundred flint points (made of local Carpathian flint) were found around
the walls of the three excavated houses as if they had been peppered with
arrows. 14 Compared to its past and its future, the Tripolye Bl period was a
time of sharply increased conflict in the Eastern Carpathians.

Contact with Steppe Cultures during Tripolye B: Cucuteni C Ware

Simultaneously with the increase in fortifications and weapons, Tripolye
Bl towns showed widespread evidence of contact with steppe cultures. A
new pottery type, Cucuteni C ware, 15 shell-tempered and similar to steppe
pottery, appeared in Tripolye Bl settlements of the South Bug valley (Sa
batinovka I) and in Romania (Dragu?eni and Fedele^eni, where Cucuteni
C ware amounted to 10% of the ceramics). Cucuteni C ware is usually
thought to indicate contact with and influence from steppe pottery tradi-
tions (figure 11.4). 16 Cucuteni C ware might have been used in ordinary
homes with standard Cucuteni-Tripolye fine wares as a new kind of coarse
or kitchen pottery, but it did not replace traditional coarse kitchen wares
tempered with grog (ground-up ceramic sherds). Some Cucuteni C pots
look very much like steppe pottery, whereas others had shell-temper,

2 J 2 Chapter //

Pre-Cucuteni -Tripolye A migrations Cucuteni A -Tripolye B1 migrations

Cucuteni AB -Tripolye B2 migrations Cucuteni B -Tripolye Cl migrations
Figure 11.3. Tripolye B1-B2 migrations. After Dergachev 2002, figure 6.2.

gray-to-brown surface color and some typical steppe decorative techniques
(like “caterpillar” impressions, made with a cord-wrapped, curved pressing
tool) but were made in typical Cucuteni-Tripolye shapes with other deco-
rative elements typical of Cucuteni-Tripolye wares.

The origin of Cucuteni C ware is disputed. There were good utilitarian
reasons for Tripolye potters to adopt shell-tempering. Shell-temper in
the clay can increase resistance to heat shock, and shell-tempered pots

Figure 11.4 Cucuteni C (bottom row) and standard Cucuteni B wares (top
two rows): (1) fine ware, Novye Ruseshti I la (Tripolye Bl); (2) fine ware, Ge-
leshti (Tripolye B2); (3-4) fine ware, Frumushika I (Tripolye Bl); (5) Cucu-
teni C ware, Frumushika II (Tripolye B2); (6-7) Cucuteni C ware, Berezovskaya
GES. After Danilenko and Shmagli 1972, Figure 7; Chernysh 1982, Figure
LXV.

can harden at lower firing temperatures, which could save fuel. 1 ' Changes
in the organization of pottery making could also have encouraged the
spread of Cucuteni C wares. Ceramic production was beginning to be
taken over by specialized ceramic-making towns during Tripolye Bl and
B2, although local household production also continued in most places.
Rows of reusable two-chambered kilns appeared at the edges of a few
settlements, with 11 kilns at Ariu§d in southeastern Transylvania. If fine

2J4 Chapter n

painted wares were beginning to be produced in villages that specialized
in making pottery and the coarse wares remained locally produced, the
change in coarse wares could have reflected the changing organization
of production.

On the other hand, these particular coarse wares obviously resembled
the pottery of steppe tribes. Many Cucuteni C pots look like they were
made by Sredni Stog potters. This suggests familiarity with steppe cul-
tures and even the presence of steppe people in some Tripolye B villages,
perhaps as hired herders or during seasonal trade fairs. Although it is un-
likely that all Cucuteni C pottery was made by steppe potters — there is
just too much of it — the appearance of Cucuteni C ware suggests intensi-
fied interactions with steppe communities.

Steppe Symbols of Power: Polished Stone Maces

Polished stone maces were another steppe artifact type that appeared in
Tripolye Bl villages. A mace, unlike an axe, cannot really be used for
anything except cracking heads. It was a new weapon type and symbol
of power in Old Europe, but maces had appeared across the steppes cen-
turies earlier in DDII, Khvalynsk, and Varfolomievka contexts. There
were two kinds — zoomorphic and eared types — and both had steppe
prototypes that were older (figure 11.5; also see figure 9.6). Mace heads
carved and polished in the shape of horse heads were found in two Cu-
cuteni A3/A4-Tripolye Bl settlements, Fitione^ti and Fedele^eni, both
of which also had significant amounts of Cucuteni C ware. The eared
type appeared at the Cucuteni-Tripolye settlements of Obar^eni and
Berezovskaya GES, also with Cucuteni C ware that at Berezovskaya
looked like it was imported from steppe communities. Were steppe
people present in these Tripolye Bl towns? It seems likely. The integra-
tion of steppe pottery and symbols of power into Cucuteni-Tripolye
material culture suggests some kind of social integration, but the main-
tenance of differences in economy, house form, fine pottery, metallurgy,
mortuary rituals, and domestic rituals indicates that it was limited to a
narrow social sector. 18

Other Signs of Contact

Most settlements of the Tripolye B period, even large ones, continued to
dispose of their dead in unknown ways. But inhumation graves appeared in
or at the edge of a few Tripolye Bl settlement sites. A grave in the settle-

End of Old Europe 235

OLD EUROPE SUVOROVO PONTIC-CASPIAN

DANUBE AND TRANSYLVANIA STEPPES

Figure 11.5 Eared and horse-head maces of Old Europe, the Suvorovo mi-
grants, and the Pontic-Caspian steppes. Stone mace heads appeared first and
were more common in the steppes. After Telegin et al. 2001; Dergachev
1999; Gheorgiu 1994; Kuzmina 2003.

ment of Nezvisko contained a man with a low skull and broad, thick-boned
face like those of steppe people — a type of skull-and-face configuration
called “Proto-Europoid” by Eastern European physical anthropologists.
Tripolye, Varna, and Gumelnita people generally had taller heads, narrower
faces, and more gracile facial bones, a configuration called “Mediterranean. 19

2j6 Chapter n

Another indicator of movement across the steppe border was the little
settlement near Mirnoe in the steppes north of the Danube delta. This
is the only known classic-period Tripolye settlement in the coastal steppe
lowlands. It had just a few pits and the remains of a light structure con-
taining sherds of Tripolye Bl and Cucuteni C pots, a few bones of cattle
and sheep, and more than a hundred grape seeds, identified as wild grapes.
Mirnoe seems to have been a temporary Tripolye Bl camp in the steppes,
perhaps for grape pickers. 20 Some people, though not many, were moving
across the cultural-ecological frontier in both directions.

During Tripolye B 2, around 4000-3700 BCE, there was a significant
migration out of the Prut-Seret forest-steppe uplands, the most densely
settled part of the Tripolye Bl landscape, eastward into the South Bug and
Dnieper valleys (figure 11.3c). Settlement density in the Prut-Seret region
declined by half. 21 Tripolye, the type site first explored in 1901, was an
eastern frontier village of the Tripolye B2 period, situated on a high terrace
overlooking the broad, fertile valley of the Dnieper River. The population
consolidated into fewer, larger settlements (only about 180 settlements per
century during Tripolye B2). The number of fortified settlements decreased
sharply.

These signs of demographic expansion and reduced conflict appeared
after the tell settlements of the Danube valley were burned and aban-
doned. It appears that any external threat from the steppes, if there was
one, turned away from Cucuteni-Tripolye towns. Why?

Steppe Riders at the Frontiers of Old Europe

Frontiers can be envisioned as peaceful trade zones where valuables are
exchanged for the mutual benefit of both sides, with economic need pre-
venting overt hostilities, or as places where distrust is magnified by cul-
tural misunderstandings, negative stereotypes, and the absence of bridging
institutions. The frontier between agricultural Europe and the steppes has
been seen as a border between two ways of life, farming and herding, that
were implacably opposed. Plundering nomads like the Huns and Mongols
are old archetypes ot savagery. But this is a misleading stereotype, and one
derived from a specialized form of militarized pastoral nomadism that did
not exist before about 800 BCE. As we saw in the previous chapter, Bronze
Age riders in the steppes used bows that were too long for effective mounted
archery. Their arrows were of varied weights and sizes. And Bronze Age
war bands were not organized like armies. The Hunnic invasion analogy is

End of Old Europe 237

anachronistic, yet that does not mean that mounted raiding never occurred
in the Eneolithic. 22

There is persuasive evidence that steppe people rode horses to hunt horses
in Kazakhstan by about 3700-3500 BCE. Almost certainly they were not
the first to ride. Given the symbolic linkage between horses, cattle, and
sheep in Pontic-Caspian steppe funerals as early as the Khvalynsk period,
horseback riding might have begun in a limited way before 4500 BCE. But
western steppe people began to act like they were riding only about 4300-
4000 BCE, when a pattern consistent with long-distance raiding began,
seen most clearly in the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka horizon described at the
end of this chapter. Once people began to ride, there was nothing to prevent
them from riding into tribal conflicts — not the supposed shortcomings of
rope and leather bits (an organic bit worked perfectly well, as our students
showed in the organic-bit riding experiment, and as the American Indian
“war bridle” demonstrated on the battlefield); not the size of Eneolithic
steppe horses (most were about the size of Roman cavalry horses, big enough);
and certainly not the use of the wrong “seat” (an argument that early riders
sat on the rump of the horse, perhaps for millennia, before they discovered
the more natural forward seat — based entirely on Near Eastern images of
riders probably made by artists who were unfamiliar with horses). 23

Although I do see evidence for mounted raiding in the Eneolithic, I do
not believe that any Eneolithic army of pitiless nomads ever lined up on the
horizon mounted on shaggy ponies, waiting for the command of their
bloodthirsty general. Eneolithic warfare was tribal warfare, so there were no
armies, just the young men of this clan fighting the young men of that clan.
And early Indo-European warfare seems from the earliest myths and poetic
traditions to have been conducted principally to gain glory — imperishable
fame , a poetic phrase shared between Pre-Greek and Pre-Indo-Iranian. If
we are going to indict steppe raiders in the destruction of Old Europe, we
first have to accept that they did not fight like later cavalry. Eneolithic war-
fare probably was a strictly seasonal activity conducted by groups organized
more like modern neighborhood gangs than modern armies. They would
have been able to disrupt harvests and frighten a sedentary population, but
they were not nomads. Steppe Eneolithic settlements like Dereivka cannot
be interpreted as pastoral nomadic camps. After nomadic cavalry is removed
from the picture, how do we understand social and political relations across
the steppe/Old European frontier?

A mutualist interpretation of steppe/farming-zone relations is one
alternative. Conflict is not denied, but it is downplayed, and mutually

2j8 Chapter u

beneficial trade and exchange are emphasized. 24 Mutualism might well
explain the relationship between the Cucuteni-Tripolye and Sredni Stog
cultures during the Tripolye B period. Among historically known pasto-
ralists in close contact with farming populations there has been a tendency
for wealthy herd owners to form alliances with farmers to acquire land as
insurance against the loss of their more volatile wealth in herds. In mod-
ern economies, where land is a market commodity, the accumulation of
property could lead the wealthiest herders to move permanently into
towns. In a pre-state tribal world this was not possible because agricultural
land was not for sale, but the strategy of securing durable alliances and
assets in agricultural communities as insurance against future herd losses
could still work. Steppe herders might have taken over the management of
some Tripolye herds in exchange for metal goods, linen textiles, or grain;
or steppe clans might have attended regular trading fairs at agricultural
towns. Annual trading fairs between mounted hunters and river-valley
corn farmers were a regular feature of life in the northern Plains of the
U.S. 25 Alliances and trade agreements sealed by marriages could account
for the increased steppe involvement in Tripolye communities during Tri-
polye Bl, about 4400-4000 BCE. The institutions that normalized these
cross-cultural relations probably included gift partnerships. In archaic
Proto-Indo-European as partly preserved in Hittite, the verb root that in
all other Indo-European languages meant “give” (V 0 -) meant “take” and
another root (pat) meant “give.” From this give-and-take equivalence and
a series of other linguistic clues Emile Benveniste concluded that, during
the archaic phase of Proto-Indo-European, “exchange appears as a round
of gifts rather than a genuine commercial operation.” 26

On the other hand, mutualism cannot explain everything, and the end of
the Varna- Karanovo VI-Gumelnita culture is one of those events it does
not explain. Lawrence Keeley sparked a heated debate among archaeologists
by insisting that warfare was common, deadly, and endemic among prehis-
toric tribal societies. Tribal frontiers might be creative places, as Frederik
Barth realized, but they often witnessed pretty nasty behavior. Tribal bor-
ders commonly were venues for insults: the Sioux called the Bannock the
“Filthy-Lodge People”; the Eskimo called the Ingalik “Nit-heads”; the Hopi
called the Navaho “Bastards”; the Algonkian called the Mohawk “Maneat-
ers”; the Shuar called the Huarani “Savages”; and the simple but eloquent
“Enemies” is a very common meaning for names given by neighboring
tribes. Because tribal frontiers displayed things people needed just beyond
the limits of their own society, the temptation to take them by force was
strong. It was doubly strong when those things had legs, like cattle. 27

End of Old Europe 2 jg

Cattle raiding was encouraged by Indo-European beliefs and rituals.
The myth of Trito, the warrior, rationalized cattle theft as the recovery of
cattle that the gods had intended for the people who sacrificed properly.
Proto-Indo-European initiation rituals included a requirement that boys
initiated into manhood bad to go out and become like a band of dogs or
wolves __ to raid their enemies. 28 Proto-Indo-European also had a word
for bride-price, *uedmo -. 29 Cattle, sheep, and probably horses would have
been used to pay bride-prices, since they generally are valued higher than
other currencies for bride-price payments in pastoral societies without
formal money. 30 Already in the preceding centuries domesticated ani-
mals had become the proper gifts for gods at funerals (e.g., at Khvalynsk).

A relatively small elite already competed across very large regions, adopt-
ing the same symbols of status— maces with polished stone heads, boars
tusk plaques, copper rings and pendants, shell disc beads, and bird-bone
tubes. When bride-prices escalated as one aspect of this competition, the
result would be increased cattle raiding by unmarried men. Combined
with the justification provided by the Trito myth and the institution of
male-initiation-group raiding, rising bride-prices calculated in animals
would have made cross-border raiding almost inevitable.

If they were on foot, Eneolithic steppe cattle raiders might have attacked
one another or attacked neighboring Tripolye settlements. But, if they were
mounted, they could pick a distant target that did not threaten valued gift
partnerships. Raiding parties of a dozen riders could move fifty to seventy-
five head of cattle or horses fairly quickly over hundreds of kilometers.
Thieving raids would have led to deaths, and then to more serious killing
and revenge raids. A cycle of warfare evolving from thieving to revenge
raids probably contributed to the collapse of the tell towns of the Danube

valley. ,

What kinds of societies lived on the steppe side of the frontier. Is there

good archaeological evidence that they were indeed deeply engaged with
Old Europe and the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture in quite different ways?

The Sredni Stog Culture: Horses and Rituals from the East

The Sredni Stog culture is the best-defined Late Eneolithic archaeological
culture in steppe Ukraine. Sredni Stog, or “middle stack,” was the name of
a small haystack-shaped island in the Dnieper at the southern end of the
Dnieper Rapids, the central one of three. All were inundated by a dam,
but before that happened, archaeologists found and excavated a site there
in 1927. It contained a stratified sequence of settlements with Early

240 Chapter 11

Eneolithic (DDII) pottery in level I and Late Eneolithic pottery in level
H- 32 Sredni Stog II became the type site for this Late Eneolithic kind of
pottery. Sredni Stog-style pottery was found stratified above older DDII
settlements at several other sites, including Strilcha Skelya and Aleksan-
driya. Dimitri Telegin, who had earlier defined the Dnieper-Donets cul-
ture, in 1973 first pulled together and mapped all the sites with Sredni
Stog material culture, about 150 in all (figure 11.6). He found Sredni Stog
sites across the Ukrainian steppes from the Ingul valley, west of the
Dnieper, on the west to the lower Don on the east.

The Sredni Stog culture became the archaeological foundation for the
Indo-European steppe pastoralists of Marija Gimbutas. The horse bones
from the Sredni Stog settlement of Dereivka, excavated by Telegin, plaved a
central role in the ensuing debates between pro-Kurgan-culture and anti-
Kurgan-culture archaeologists. I described in the last chapter how Gimbu-
tas s interpretation of the horses o t Dereivka was challenged by Levine.
Simultaneously Yuri Rassamakin challenged Telegin s concept of the Sredni
Stog culture. 13

Rassamakin separated Telegins Sredni Stog culture into at least three
separate cultures, reordered and redated some of the resulting pieces, and
refocused the central cause of social and political change away from the
development of horse riding and agro-pastoralism in the steppes (Telegin’s
themes) to the integration of steppe societies into the cultural sphere of Old
Europe, which was Rassamakins new mutualist theme. But Rassamakin
assigned well-dated sites like Dereivka and Khvalynsk to periods inconsis-
tent with their radiocarbon dates. 34 Telegins groupings seem to me to be
better documented and explained, so I retain the Sredni Stog culture as a
framework for ordering Eneolithic sites in Ukraine, while disagreeing
with Telegin in some details.

This was the critical era when innovative early Proto-Indo-European
dialects began to spread across the steppes. The principal causes of change
in the steppes included both the internal maturation of new economic
systems and new social networks (Telegins theme) and the inauguration
of new interactions with Old Europe (Rassamakins theme).

The Origins and Development of the Sredni Stog Culture

We should not imagine that Sredni Stog, or any other archaeological cul-
ture, appeared or disappeared everywhere at the same time. Telegin de-
fined four broad phases (la, lb, Ila, lib) in its evolution, but a phase might
last longer in some regions than others. In his scheme, the settlements at

Sljachovskoe

Figure 11.6 Steppe and Danubian sites at the time of the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka intrusion, about 4200-3900
BCE.

End of Old Europe 243

242 Chapter 11

EARLY SREDNISTOG

Figure 11.7 Sredni Stog pottery and tools, early and late. Perforated hone or
antler artifacts like (h) were identified as cheekpieces for horse bits, but this
identification is speculative. After Telegin 2002, figure 3.1.

Sredni Stog and Strilcha Skelya on the Dnieper represented an early phase
(lb), which Rassamakin called the Skelya culture. The pottery of this
phase lacked cord-impressed decoration. The settlements at Dereivka (Ha)
and Moliukhor Bugor (lib) on the Dnieper represented the late phases,
with braided cord impressions on the pottery (figure 11.7). Early Sredni
Stog (phase I) was contemporary with the violent era of Tripolye B1 and
the crisis in the Danube valley. Tripolye B1 painted pottery was found at

Table 11.2

Radiocarbon Dates for Late Eneolithic Cultures from the Lower Danube to the North
Caucasus

Lab Number

BP Date

Sample

Calibrated Date

1. Sredni Stog culture

Dereivka, Dnieper Valley

Ki 2195

6240 ±100

settlement, shell

5270-5058 BCE

UCLA 1466a

5515±90

settlement, bone

4470-4240 BCE

Ki 2193

5400±100

settlement, shell

4360-4040 BCE

OxA 5030

5380190

cemetery, grave 2

4350-4040 BCE

KI 6966

5370170

settlement, bone

4340-4040 BCE

Ki 6960

5330160

settlement, bone

4250-4040 BCE

KI 6964

5260175

settlement, bone

4230-3990 BCE

Ki 2197

5230195

settlement, bone

4230-3970 BCE

Ki 6965

5210170

settlement, bone

4230-3960 BCE

UCLA 1671a

49001100

settlement, bone

3900-3530 BCE

Ki 5488

43301120

cult horse skull??

3300-2700 BCE

Ki 6962

2490195

cult horse skull

790-520 BCE

OxA 7185

2295160

cult horse tooth with

410-200 BCE

bit wear

OxA 6577

1995160

bone near cult horse

90 BCE-70CE

Aleksandriya, Donets Valley

Ki-104

54701300

?

4750-3900 BCE

2. North Caucasian Eneolithic

Svobodnoe settlement

Le-4531

54001250

}

4500-3950 BCE

Le-4532

54751100

}

4460-4160 BCE

3. Varna Culture, Bulgaria, lower Danube

Durankulak tell settlement

Bin -2122

5700150

settlement, level 5

4600-4450 BCE

Bin -2111

5495160

settlement, house 7

4450-4250 BCE

Bin -2121

5475150

settlement, level 4

4360-4240 BCE

Pavelyanovo 1 tell settlement

Bln-1141

55911100

settlement

4540-4330 BCE

244 Chapter n

Table 11.2 ( continued )

Lab Number BP Date Sample Calibrated Date

4. Gumelnitsa culture, Romania, lower Danube

Vulcanesti II, Bolgrad group

MO-417 5110±150 settlement 4050-3700 BCE

Le-640 5300 ±60 settlement 4230-4000 BCE

Gumelnitsa, tell settlement
GrN-3025 5715170

Bln-605 5675180

Bln-604 55801100

Bln-343 54851120

GrN-3028 5400190

5. Suvorovo Group, lower Danube

Giurgiule§ti, cemetery, lower Prut/Danube

Ki-7037 5398169* ? 4340-4050 BCE

*This date was printed in Telegin et al. 2001 as 4398169 BP, but I was told that this was a misprint
and that the actual reported date was 5398-1-69 BP.

Strilcha Skelya. The stylistic changes that identified late Sredni Stog
(phase II) probably began while the crisis in the Danube valley was going
on, but then most of the late Sredni Stog period occurred after the col-
lapse of Old Europe. Imported Tripolye B2 bowls were found in graves in
the phase Ha cemeteries at Dereivka and Igren, and a Tripolye Cl vessel
was found at the phase lib Moliukhor Bugor settlement. The Dereivka
settlement (phase Ila) is dated between 4200 and 3700 BCE by ten radio-
carbon dates (table 11.2). The latest Sredni Stog period (lib) is dated as
late as 3600-3300 BCE by four radiocarbon dates at Petrovskaya Balka
on the Dnieper. Early Sredni Stog probably began around 4400 BCE; late
Sredni Stog probably lasted until 3400 BCE in some places on the
Dnieper.

The origin of the Sredni Stog culture is poorly understood, but people
from the east, perhaps from the Volga steppes, apparently played a role.
Round-bottomed Sredni Stog shell-tempered pots were quite different
from DDII pots of the Early Eneolithic, which were sand-tempered and

settlement, charcoal 4680-4450 BCE

settlement, charcoal 4620-4360 BCE

settlement, charcoal 4540-4330 BCE

settlement, charcoal 4460-41 10 BCE

settlement, charred grain 4340-4050 BCE

End of Old Europe 24 s

flat-based (see figure 9.5). Almost all early Sredni Stog vessels had round
or pointed bases and flaring, everted rims. Flat-based pots appeared only
in the late period. Simple open bowls, probably food bowls, were the other
common shape, usually undecorated. Sredni Stog pots were decorated just
on the upper third of the vessel with rows of comb-stamped impressions,
incised triangles, and cord impressions. Rows of U-shaped “caterpillar”
impressions made with a U-shaped, cord-wrapped tool were typical (fig -
ure 11. 7d). One pot shape, with a rounded body and a short vertical neck
decorated with vertically combed lines (figure 11.7m) was copied directly
from a common Tripolye B1 type. The round-based pots and shell temper
seem to reflect influence from the east, from the Azov-Caspian or Volga
regions, where there was a long tradition of shell-tempered, round-
bottomed, everted-rim, impressed pottery beginning in the Neolithic and
continuing through Eneolithic Khvalynsk.

Sredni Stog funeral rituals also were new. The new Sredni Stog burial
posture (on the back with the knees raised) and standard orientation (head
to the east-northeast) copied that of the Khvalynsk culture on the Volga
(figure 11.8). The communal collective grave pits of DDII were aban-
doned. Individual single graves took their place. Cemeteries also became
much smaller. The DDII cemetery near Dereivka had contained 173 indi-
viduals, most of them in large communal grave pits. The Sredni Stog
cemetery near Dereivka contained only 12 graves, all single burials. Sredni
Stog communities probably were smaller and more mobile. Graves had no
surface marker, as at Dereivka, or exhibited a new surface treatment: some
were surrounded by a small circle of stones and covered by a low stone or
earth mound — a very modest kurgan — as at Kvityana or Maiorka. These
probably were the earliest kurgans in the steppes. Stone circles and mounds
were features that isolated and emphasized individuals. The shift from a
communal funeral ritual to an individual ritual probably was a symptom
of broader changes toward more openly self-aggrandizing social values,
which were also reflected in a series of rich graves of the Suvorovo-
Novodanilovka type discussed separately below.

Sredni Stog skull types also exhibited new traits. The DDII population
had been a single homogeneous type, with a very broad, thick-boned face
of the Proto-Europoid configuration. Sredni Stog populations included
people with a more gracile bone structure and medium-width faces that
showed the strongest statistical similarity to the Khvalynsk population.
Immigrants from the Volga seem to have arrived in the Dnieper-Azov
steppes at the beginning of the shift from DDII to Sredni Stog, instigating

End of Old Europe 247

246 Chapter //

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Sredni Stog culture cemetery

Figure 11.8 Sredni Stog graves, Igren cemetery, Dnieper Rapids.
Graves were quite scattered. After Telegin et al. 2001.

changes in both funeral customs and pottery making. Perhaps they arrived
on horseback. 35

The places where people lived and put their cemeteries did not change
markedly when Sredni Stog began. Sredni Stog settlements were strati-
fied above DDII settlements at several sites near the Dnieper Rapids and
on the Donets. Sredni Stog graves were located in or near DDII cemeter-

ies at Mariupol, Igren, and Dereivka. Stone tools also showed continuity,
lamellar flint blades, triangular flint points, and large almond-shaped
flint points were made in both periods. Long unifacial flint blades were
occasionally found in hoards in DDII sites but were found in much larger
hoards in Sredni Stog sites, where some single hoards (Goncharovka)
contained more than a hundred flint blades up to 20 cm long. These
blades were typical grave gifts in Sredni Stog graves. Similar long flint
blades became popular trade items across eastern Europe, appearing also
in Funnel Beaker (TRB) sites in Poland and in Bodrogkeresztur sites in

Hungary.

The Sredni Stog Economy: Horses and Agro-Pastoralism

Sredni Stog settlements had, on average, more than twice as many horse
bones as DDII settlements in the Dnieper valley, where most ot the studied
sites are located. This increase in the use of horses for food could have been
connected with the colder climate of the period 4200-3800 BCE, since
domesticated horses are easier to maintain than cattle and sheep in snowy
conditions (chapter 10). The maintenance advantage would, of course, have
been gained only with domesticated horses. Horses were by far the most
important source of meat at the Sredni Stog settlement of Dereivka. The
2,408 horse bones counted by Bibikova represented at least fifty-one ani-
mals (MNI)— more than half the mammals butchered at the site and

9,000 kg of meat. 36

Domesticated cattle, sheep, and pigs accounted tor between 12 As and
84% of the bones (NISP) from the settlements of Sredni Stog II, Dereivka,
Aleksandriya, and Moliukhor Bugor (table 11.1). If horses are counted as
domesticated animals, the percentage of domesticated animals at these
settlements rises to 30-93%. The percentage of horse bones ranged from
7-63% of all bones found (average 54% NISP but with much variation).
The highest percentage (63 percent of the mammal bones NISP, 28% of the
individual mammals MNI) was at Dereivka, which was also the site with
the largest sample of animal bones. 37 Sheep or goats were by tar the most
common animals (61% of mammals) in the southernmost site, Sredni Stog,
in the driest steppe environment; and hunted game was most important
(70% of mammals) at Moliukhor Bugor, the northenmost site, in the most
forested environment. In the north, where forest resources were richer, deer
hunting remained important, and in the steppe river valleys, where gallery
forests were confined to the valley bottoms, sheep herding necessarily sup-
plied a larger proportion of the diet.

End of Old Europe 249

248 Chapter //

Table 11.1

Mammal Bones from Sredni Stog Culture

% horse

% cattle

% caprine

%pig

% dog

% horse

(% of 'all bones , NISP/ % of individuals, MNI)*

Sredni Stog II

mi

21/12

61/47

2/6

3/11

7/22

Dereivka

63/52

16/8

2/7

3/4

1/2

17/45

Aleksandriya

29/24

37/20

7/12

—

—

27/44

Moliukhor Bugorll

18/9

10/9

—

2/6

—

70/76

*NISP= number of identified species; MNI= minimum number of individuals.

Dereivka is the Sredni Stog settlement with the largest archaeological
exposure, about 2000 m’. It was located west of the Dnieper in the north-
ern steppes. A scattered cemetery of twelve Sredni Stog graves was found
half a kilometer upstream from the settlement. 38 Three shallow ovoid
house pits, measuring about 12 m by 5 m, surrounded an open area used
for ceramic manufacture, flint working, and other tasks (figure 11.9).
A thick midden of river shellfish shells ( Unio and Paludinae) enclosed one
side. Only a part of the settlement was excavated, so we do not know how
large it was. The mammal bones would have provided 1 kilo of meat per
house, for the three houses, every day for more than eight years, indicating
that Dereivka was occupied many times or for many years. On the other
hand, the ephemeral nature of the Dereivka architectural remains and the
small size of the nearby cemetery suggest that it was not a permanent set-
tlement. Probably it was a favored living site that was revisited over many
years by people who had large herds of horses (62% NISP) and cattle (16%
NISP), hunted red deer (10% NISP), trapped or shot ducks (mallard and
pintail), fished for wels catfish ( Silurus glams ) and perch ( Lucioperca la-
cioperca ), and cultivated a little grain.

The ceramics from the Dereivka settlement have not been examined sys-
tematically for seed imprints, but Dereivka had flint blades with sickle gloss;
three flat, ovoid grinding stones; and six polished schist mortars. Cultivated
wheat, barley, and millet ( T. dicoccum, T. monococcum, H. vulgare, P. milia-
ceum) have been identified in ceramic imprints at the phase lib settlement of
Moliukhor Bugor. Probably some grain cultivation occurred at Dereivka
also, perhaps the first grain cultivation practiced east of the Dnieper.

Figure 11.9 Dereivka settlement, Sredni Stog culture, 4200-3700 BCE. The
location of the intrusive horse skull with bit wear is noted. The top edge is an
eroded riverbank. After Telegin 1986.

Were the people of the Sredni Stog culture horse riders? Without bit
wear or some other pathology associated with riding we cannot be certain.
Objects from Dereivka tentatively identified as antler cheekpieces for bits
(figure 11. 7h) could have had other functions. 39 One way to approach this
question is to ask if the steppe societies of the Late Eneolithic behaved like
horseback riders. It looks to me like they did. Increased mobility (implied
by smaller cemeteries), more long-distance trade, increased prestige and
power for prominent individuals, status weapons appearing in graves, and
heightened warfare against settled agricultural communities are all things
we would expect to occur after horseback riding started, and we see them
most clearly in cemeteries of the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka type.

Migrations into the Danube Valley:

The Suvorovo-Novodanilovka Complex

About 4200 BCE herders who probably came from the Dnieper valley ap-
peared on the northern edge of the Danube delta. The lake country north
of the delta was then occupied by Old European farmers of the Bolgrad
culture. They left quickly after the steppe people showed up. The immigrants

I

2 jo Chapter u

m

Figure 11.10 Suvorovo-Novodanilovka ornaments and weapons, about 4200-
3900 BCE. (a, c) Vinogradni shell and canine tooth beads; (b) Suvorovo shell
and deer tooth beads; (d) Decea Muresului shell beads; (e) Krivoy Rog shell
beads; (f) Chapli lamellar flint blades; (g) Petro-Svistunovo, bone button and
cast copper axe; (h) Petro-Svistunovo boars tusk (top), Giurgiulesti copper-
sheathed boars tusk ( bottom ); (j) Chapli copper ornaments, including copper
imitations of Cardium shells; (i) Utkonosovka bone beads; (k) Kainari copper
“torque” with shell beads; (1) Petro-Svistunovo copper bracelet; (m) Suvorovo

End of Old Europe 251

built kurgan graves and carried maces with stone heads shaped like horse
heads, objects that quickly appeared in a number of Old European towns.
They acquired, either by trade or as loot, copper from the tell towns of the
lower Danube valley, much of which they directed back into the steppes
•around the lower Dnieper. Their move into the lower Danube valley prob-
ably was the historical event that separated the Pre-Anatolian dialects,
spoken by the migrants, from the archaic Proto-Indo-European language
community back in the steppes.

The archaeology that documents this event emerged into the literature
in small bits and pieces over the last fifty years, and it is still is not widely
known. The steppe culture involved in the migration has been called vari-
ously the Skelya culture, the Suvorovo culture, the Utkonsonovka group,
and the Novodanilovka culture. I will call it the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka
complex (see figure 11.6). One cluster of graves, created by the migrants, is
concentrated near the Danube delta. This was the Suvorovo group. Their
relatives back home in the North Pontic steppes were the Novodanilovka
group. Only graves are known for either group. About thirty-five to forty
cemeteries are assigned to the complex, most containing fewer than ten
graves and many, like Novodanilovka itself, represented by just a single
rich burial. They first appeared during early Sredni Stog, around 4300-
4200 BCE, and probably ceased before 3900 BCE.

In his earliest discussions Telegin interpreted the Novodanilovka
graves (his term) as a wealthy elite element within the Sredni Stog cul-
ture. Later he changed his mind and made them a separate culture. I agree
with his original position: the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka complex rep-
resents the chiefly elite within the Sredni Stog culture. Novodanilovka
graves are distributed across the same territory as graves and settlements
designated Sredni Stog, and many aspects of grave ritual and lithics are
identical. The Suvorovo-Novodanilovka elite was involved in raiding and
trading with the lower Danube valley during the Tripolye B1 period,

just before the collapse of Old Europe. 40

The people buried in these graves wore long belts and necklaces of shell
disc beads, copper beads, and horse or deer tooth beads; copper rings; copper
shell-shaped pendants; and copper spiral bracelets (figure 11.10). They bent
thick pieces of copper wire into neckrings (“torques”) decorated with shell
beads, used copper awls, occasionally carried solid cast copper shaft-hole axes

Figure 11.10 {continued) and Aleksandriya copper awls; (n) Giurgiulejti com-
posite spear-head, bone with flint microblade edges and tubular copper fit-
tings. After Ryndina 1998, figure 76; and Telegin et al. 2001.

End of Old Europe 2jj

252 Chapter 11

(cast in a two-part mold), and put copper and gold fittings around the dark
wood of their spears and javelins. In 1998 N. Ryndina counted 362 objects
of copper and 1 of gold from thirty Suvorovo-Novodanilovka graves. They
also carried polished stone mace heads made in several shapes, including
horse heads (see figure 11.5). They used large triangular flint points, prob-
ably for spears/javelins; small round-butted flint axes with the cutting edge
ground sharp; and long lamellar flint blades, often made of gray flint quar-
ried from outcrops on the Donets River.

Most Suvorovo-Novodanilovka graves contained no pottery, and so
they are difficult to link to a ceramic type. Imported ceramics were found
in several graves: a Tripolye Bl pot in the Kainari kurgan, between the
Prut and Dniester; a late Gumelnita vessel in the Kopchak kurgan, not far
from Kainari; another late Gumelnita vessel in grave 2 at Giurgiulejti, on
the lower Prut; and a long-traveled pot of North Caucasian Svobodnoe
type in the Novodanilovka grave in the Dnieper-Azov steppes. These im-
ported pots were all the same age, dated roughly 4400-4000 BCE, and so
are useful chronologically, but they throw no light on the cultural affilia-
tion of the individuals in the graves. Only a few potsherds actually seem to
have been made by the people who built the graves. One of the principal
graves (gr. 1) at Suvorovo had two small sherds of a pot made of gray,
shell-tempered clay, decorated with a small-toothed stamp and incised
diagonal lines (figure 11.11). An analogous pot was found in Utkonosovka,
kurgan 3, grave 2, near Suvorovo. These sherds resembled Cucuteni C ce-
ramics: round body, round base, everted rim, shell-tempered, with diago-
nal incised and comb-stamped surface decoration. 41

The Suvorovo graves around the Danube delta always were marked by
the erection of a mound or kurgan, probably to increase their visibility on
a disputed frontier, but possibly also as a visual response to the tells of the
lower Danube valley (figure 11.11). Suvorovo kurgans were among the
first erected in the steppes. Back in the Dnieper-Azov steppes, most No-
vodanilovka graves also had a surface marker of some kind, but earthen
kurgans were less common than small stone cairns piled above the grave
(Chapli, Yama). Kurgans in the Danube steppes were rarely were more
than 10 m in diameter, and often were surrounded by a ring of small
stones or a cromlech (retaining wall) of large stones. The grave pit was
usually rectangular but sometimes oval. The Sredni Stog burial posture
(on the back with knees raised) appeared in most (Csongrad, Chapli, No-
vodanilovka, Giurgiulejti, Suvorovo grave 7) but not all graves. In some
the body was laid out extended (Suvorovo grave 1) or contracted on the
side (Utkonosovka). Animal sacrifices occurred in some graves (cattle at

Figure 11.11 Suvorovo-type kurgan graves and pots. Most Suvorovo graves
contained no pottery or contained pots made by other cultures, and so these
few apparently self-made pots are important: left , Suvorovo cemetery II kur-
gan 1; right , Artsiza kurgan; bottom, sherds and pots from graves. After Alek-
seeva 1976, figure 1.

Giurgiulejti, cattle and sheep at Chapli, and cattle at Krivoy Rog). The
people buried in Novodanilovka graves in the Pontic steppes were wide-
faced Proto-Europoid types, like the dominant element in Sredni Stog
graves, whereas at least some of those buried in Suvorovo graves such as
Giurgiulejti had narrow faces and gracile skulls, suggesting intermarriage
with local Old European people. 42

The copper from Suvorovo-Novodanilovka graves helps to date them.
Trace elements in the copper from Giurgiulejti and Suvorovo in the lower
Danube, and from Chapli and Novodanilovka in the Pontic steppes, are
typical of the mines in the Bulgarian Balkans (Ai Bunar and/or Medni
Rud) that abruptly ceased production when Old Europe collapsed. The east-
ern European copper trade shifted to chemically distinctive Hungarian and

254 Chapter n

Transylvanian ores during Tripolye B2, after 4000 BCE. 43 So Suvorovo-
Novodanilovka is dated before 4000 BCE by its copper. On the other hand,
Suvorovo kurgans replaced the settlements of the Bolgrad group north of
the Danube delta, which were still occupied during early Tripolye Bl, or
after about 4400-4300 BCE. These two bookends (after the abandonment
of Bolgrad, before the wider Old European collapse) restrict Suvorovo-
Novodanilovka to a period between about 4300 and 4000 BCE.

Polished stone mace-heads shaped like horse heads were found in the
main grave at Suvorovo and at Casimcea in the Danube delta region (fig-
ure 11.5). Similar mace-heads occurred at two Tripolye Bl settlements, at
two late Karanovo VI settlements, and up the Danube valley at the settle-
ment of Salcuta IV — all of them in Old European towns contemporary
with the Suvorovo intrusion. Similar horse-head mace-heads were found
in the Volga-Ural steppes and in the Kalmyk steppes north of the Terek
River at Terekli-Mekteb. 44 “Eared” stone mace heads appeared first in
several cemeteries of the Khvalynsk culture (Khvalynsk, Krivoluchie) and
then somewhat later at several eastern steppe sites contemporary with
Suvorovo-Novodanilovka (Novorsk, Arkhara, and Sliachovsko) and in two
Tripolye Bl towns. Cruciform mace heads appeared first in the grave of a
DDII chief at Nikolskoe on the Dnieper (see figure 9.6), and then reap-
peared centuries later with the Suvorovo migration into Transylvania at
Decea Mure^ului and Ocna Sibiului; one example also appeared at a Tri-
polye settlement on the Prut (Barlale^ti).

Polished stone maces were typical steppe prestige objects going back to
Khvalynsk, Varfolomievka, and DDII, beginning ca. 5000-4800 BCE.
They were not typical prestige objects for earlier Tripolye or Gumelnita
societies. 45 Maces shaped into horse-heads probably were made by people
for whom the horse was a powerful symbol. Horse bones averaged only
3-6% of mammal bones in Tripolye Bl settlements and even less in
Gumelnita, and so horses were not important in Old European diets. The
horse-head maces signaled a new iconic status for the horse just when the
Suvorovo people appeared. If horses were not being ridden into the Dan-
ube valley, it is difficult to explain their sudden symbolic importance in
Old European settlements. 46

The Causes and Targets of the Migrations

Winters began to get colder in the interior steppes after about 4200 BCE.
The marshlands of the Danube delta are the largest in Europe west of the
Volga. Marshes were the preferred winter refuge for nomadic pastoralists

End of Old Europe 255

in the Black Sea steppes during recorded history, because they offered
good winter forage and cover for cattle. The Danube delta was richer in
this resource than any other place on the Black Sea. The first Suvorovo
herders who appeared on the northern edge of the Danube delta about
4200-4100 BCE might have brought some of their cattle south from the
Dnieper steppes during a period of particularly cold winters.

Another attraction was the abundant copper that came from Old Euro-
pean towns. The archaeologist Susan Vehik argued that increased levels of
conflict associated with climatic deterioration in the southwestern U.S.
Plains around 1250 BCE created an increased demand for gift-wealth (to
attract and retain allies in tribal warfare) and therefore stimulated long-
distance trade for prestige goods. 4 ' But the Suvorovo immigrants did not
establish gift exchanges like those I have hypothesized for their relations
with Cucuteni-Tripolye people. Instead, they seem to have chased the lo-
cals away.

The thirty settlements of the Bolgrad culture north of the Danube delta
were abandoned and burned soon after the Suvorovo immigrants arrived.
These small agricultural villages were composed of eight to ten semi-
subterranean houses with fired clay hearths, benches, and large storage pots
set in pits in the floor. Graphite-painted fine pottery and numerous female
figurines show a mixture of Gumelnita (Aldeni II type) and Tripolye A
traits. 48 They were occupied mainly during Tripolye A, then were aban-
doned and burned during early Tripolye Bl, probably around 4200-4100
BCE. Most of the abandonments apparently were planned, since almost
everything was picked up. But at Vulcane^ti II, radiocarbon dated 4200-
4100 BCE (5300 ± 60 BP), abandonment was quick, with many whole pots
left to burn. This might date the arrival of the Suvorovo migrants. 49

A second and seemingly smaller migration stream branched off from
the first and ran westward to the Transylvanian plateau and then down
the copper-rich Mure§ River valley into eastern Hungary. These migrants
left cemeteries at Decea Mure^ului in the Mure§ valley and at Csongrad
in the plains of eastern Hungary. At Decea Mure^ului, near important
copper deposits, there were fifteen to twenty graves, posed on the back
with the knees probably originally raised but fallen to the left or right,
colored with red ochre, with Unio shell beads, long flint blades (up to
22 cm long), copper awls, a copper rod “torque,” and two tour-knobbed
mace heads made of black pol ished stone (see figure 11.10). The migrants
arrived at the end of the Tiszapolgar and the beginning of the Bodrog-
keresztur periods, about 4000-3900 BCE, but seemed not to disrupt the
local cultural traditions. Hoards of large golden and copper ornaments ot

256 Chapter //

Old European types were hidden at Hencida and Mojgrad in eastern
Hungary, probably indicating unsettled conditions, but otherwise there
was a lot of cultural continuity between Tiszapolgar and Bodrogkeresz-
tur. 50 This was no massive folk migration but a series of long-distance
movements by small groups, exactly the kind of movement expected among
horseback riders.

The Suvorovo Graves

The Suvorovo kurgan (Suvorovo II k.l) was 13 m in diameter and covered
four Eneolithic graves (see figure 11. II). 51 Stones a meter tall formed a
cromlech around the base of the mound. Within the cromlech two smaller
stone circles were built on a north-south axis, each surrounding a central
grave (gr. 7 and 1). Grave 7 was the double grave of an adult male and fe-
male buried supine with raised legs, heads to the east. The floor of the
grave was covered with red ochre, white chalk, and black fragments of
charcoal. A magnificent polished stone mace shaped like the head of a
horse lay on the pelvis of the male (see figure 11.5). Belts of shell disk
beads draped the females hips. The grave also contained two copper awls
made of Balkan copper, three lamellar flint blades, and a flint end scraper.
Grave 1, in the other stone circle, contained an adult male in an extended
position and two sherds of a shell- tempered pot.

The Suvorovo cemetery at Giurgiule^ti, near the mouth of the Prut, con-
tained five graves grouped around a hearth full of burned animal bones. 52
Above grave 4, that of the adult male, was another deposit of cattle skulls
and bones. Graves 4 and 5 were those of an adult male and female; graves
1, 2, and 3, contained three children, apparently a family group. The graves
were covered by a mound, but the excavators were uncertain if the mound
was built for these graves or was made later. The pose in four of the five
graves was on the back with raised knees (grave 2 contained disarticulated
bones), and the grave floors were painted with red ochre. Two children (gr.
1 and 3) and the adult woman (gr. 5) together wore nineteen copper spiral
bracelets and five boars-tusk pendants, one of which was covered in sheet
copper (see figure 11.10:h). Grave 2 contained a late Gumelnita pot. The
children and adult female also had great numbers (exact count not pub-
lished) of copper beads, shell disc beads, beads of red deer teeth, two beads
made of Aegean coral, flint blades, and a flint core. Six of eight metal ob-
jects analyzed by N. Ryndina were made from typical Varna-Gumelni^a
Balkan ores. One bracelet and one ring were made of an intentional arsenic-
copper alloy (respectively, 1.9% and 1.2% arsenic) that had never occurred

End of Old Europe 257

in Varna or Gumelnita metals. The adult male buried in grave 4 had two
gold rings and two composite projectile points, each more than 40 cm long,
made with microlithic flint blades slotted along the edges of a bone point
decorated with copper and gold tubular fittings (see figure 11.10m). They
probably were for two javelins, perhaps the preferred weapons of Suvorovo
riders.

Kurgans also appeared south of the Danube River in the Dobruja at
Casimcea, where an adult male was buried in an ochre-stained grave on his
back with raised knees, accompanied by a polished stone horse-head mace
(see figure 11.5), five triangular flint axes, fifteen triangular flint points, and
three lamellar flint blades. Another Suvorovo grave was placed in an older
Varna-culture cemetery at Devnya, near Varna. This single grave contained
an adult male in an ochre-stained grave on his back with raised knees, ac-
companied by thirty-two golden rings, a copper axe, a copper decorative
pin, a copper square-sectioned chisel 27 cm long, a bent copper wire 1.64 m
long, thirty-six flint lamellar blades, and five triangular flint points.

A separate (about 80-90 km distant) but contemporary cluster of kurgans
was located between the Prut and Dniester valleys near the Tripolye frontier
(Kainari, Artsiza, and Kopchak). At Kainari, only a dozen kilometers from
the Tripolye B1 settlement of Novi Ru$e$ti, a kurgan was erected over a
grave with a copper “torque” strung with Unio shell disc beads (see figure
11.10:k); long lamellar flint blades, red ochre, and a Tripolye B1 pot.

The Novodanilovka Group

Back in the steppes north of the Black Sea the elite were buried with cop-
per spiral bracelets, rings, and bangles; copper beads of several types; cop-
per shell-shaped pendants; and copper awls, all containing Balkan trace
elements and made technologically just like the objects at Giurgiule^ti
and Suvorovo. 53 Copper shell-shaped pendants, a very distinctive steppe
ornament type, occurred in both Novodanilovka (Chapli) and Suvorovo
(Giurgiule^ti) graves (see figure 11.10:j): The grave floors were strewn with
red ochre or with a chunk of red ochre. The body was positioned on the
back with raised knees and the head oriented toward the east or northeast.
Surface markers were a small kurgan or stone cairn, often surrounded by a
stone circle or cromlech. The following were among the richest:

Novodanilovka , a single stone-lined cist grave containing two adults
at Novodanilovka in the dry hills between the Dnieper and the Sea
of Azov with two copper spiral bracelets, more than a hundred

258 Chapter u

Unio shell beads, fifteen lamellar flint blades, and a pot imported
from the North Caucasian Svobodnoe culture;

Krivoy Rog y in the Ingulets valley, west of the Dnieper, a kurgan
covering two graves (1 and 2) with flint axes, flint lamellar blades,
a copper spiral bracelet, two copper spiral rings, hundreds of cop-
per beads, a gold tubular shaft fitting, Unio disc beads, and other
objects;

Chapli (see figure 11.10) at the north end of the Dnieper Rapids,
with five rich graves. The richest of these (la and 3a) were chil-
dren’s graves with two copper spiral bracelets, thirteen shell-
shaped copper pendants, more than three hundred copper beads, a
copper foil headband, more than two hundred Unio shell beads,
one lamellar flint blade, and one boars-tusk pendant like those at
Giurgiule^ti; and

Petro-Svistunovo (see figure 11.10), a cemetery of twelve cromlechs at
the south end of the Dnieper Rapids largely destroyed by erosion,
with Grave 1 alone yielding two copper spiral bracelets, more than
a hundred copper beads, three flint axes, and a flint lamellar blade,
and the other graves yielding three more spiral bracelets, a massive
cast copper axe comparable to some from Varna, and boars-tusk
pendants like those at Chapli and Giurgiule$ti.

About eighty Sredni Stog cemeteries looked very similar in ritual and
occurred in the same region but did not contain the prestige goods that
appeared in the Novodanilovka graves, which probably were the graves of
clan chiefs. The chiefs redistributed some of their imported Balkan wealth.
For example, in the small Sredni Stog cemetery at Dereivka, grave 1 con-
tained three small copper beads and grave 4 contained an imported Tri-
polye Bl bowl. The other graves contained no grave gifts at all.

Warfare, Climate Change, and Language Shift
in the Lower Danube Valley

The colder climate of 4200-3800 BCE probably weakened the agricultural
economies of Old Europe at the same time that steppe herders pushed into
the marshes and plains around the mouth of the Danube. Climate change
probably played a significant role in the ensuing crisis, because virtually all
the cultures that occupied tell settlements in southeastern Europe aban-
doned them about 4000 BCE — in the lower Danube valley, the Balkans,

End of Old Europe 259

on the Aegean coast (the end of Sitagroi III), and even in Greece (the end
of Late Neolithic II in Thessaly). 54

But even if climatic cooling and crop failures must have been significant
causes of these widespread tell abandonments, they were not the only
cause. The massacres at Yunatsite and Hotnitsa testify to conflict. Polished
stone mace heads were status weapons that glorified the cracking of heads.
Many Suvorovo-Novodanilovka graves contained sets of lanceolate flint
projectile points, flint axes, and, in the Giurgiule^ti chief’s grave, two
fearsome 40-cm javelin heads decorated with copper and gold. Persistent
raiding and warfare would have made fixed settlements a strategic liabil-
ity. Raids by Slavic tribes caused the abandonment of all the Greek-
Byzantine cities in this same region over the course of less than a hundred
years in the sixth century CE. Crop failures exacerbated by warfare would
have encouraged a shift to a more mobile economy. 55 As that shift hap-
pened, the pastoral tribes of the steppes were transformed from scruffy
immigrants or despised raiders to chiefs and patrons who were rich in the
animal resources that the new economy required, and who knew how to
manage larger herds in new ways, most important among these that herd-
ers were mounted on horseback.

The Suvorovo chiefs displayed many of the behaviors that fostered lan-
guage shift among the Acholi in East Africa: they imported a new funeral
cult with an associated new mortuary ideology; they sponsored funeral
feasts, always events to build alliances and recruit allies; they displayed
icons of power (stone maces); they seem to have glorified war (they were
buried with status weapons); and it was probably their economic example
that prompted the shift to pastoral economies in the Danube valley. Proto-
Indo-European religion and social structure were both based on oath-
bound promises that obligated patrons (or the gods) to provide protection
and gifts of cattle and horses to their clients (or humans). The oath Chfitos)
that secured these obligations could, in principle, be extended to clients
from the Old European tells.

An archaic Proto-Indo-European language, probably ancestral to Ana-
tolian, spread into southeastern Europe during this era of warfare, dislo-
cation, migration, and economic change, around 4200-3900 BCE. In a
similar situation, in a context of chronic warfare on the Pathan/Baluch
border in western Pakistan, Frederik Barth described a steady stream of
agricultural Pathans who had lost their land and then crossed over and
joined the pastoral Baluch. Landless Pathan could not regain their status
in other Pathan villages, where land was necessary for respectable status.
Tells and their fixed field systems might have played a similar limiting role

260 Chapter n

in Old European status hierarchies. Becoming the client of a pastoral pa-
tron who offered protection and rewards in exchange for service was an
alternative that held the promise of vertical social mobility for the chil-
dren. The speakers of Proto-Indo-European talked about gifts and honors
awarded for great deeds and loot/booty acquired unexpectedly, suggest-
ing that achievement-based honor and wealth could be acquired. 56 Under
conditions of chronic warfare, displaced tell dwellers may well have ad-
opted an Indo-European patron and language as they adopted a pastoral
economy.

After the Collapse

In the centuries after 4000 BCE, sites of the Cernavoda I type spread
through the lower Danube valley (figure 11.12). Cernavoda I was a settle-
ment on a promontory overlooking the lower Danube. Cernavoda I mate-
rial culture probably represented the assimilation of migrants from the
steppes with local people who had abandoned their tells. Cernavoda I ce-
ramics appeared at Pevec and Hotnitsa-Vodopada in north-central Bul-
garia, and at Renie II in the lower Prut region. These settlements were
small, with five to ten pit-houses, and were fortified. Cernavoda I pottery
also occurred in settlements of other cultural types, as at Telish IV in
northwestern Bulgaria. Cernavoda I pottery included simplified versions
of late Gumelnita shapes, usually dark-surfaced and undecorated but made
in shell-tempered fabrics. The U-shaped “caterpillar” cord impressions
(figure 11.12i), dark surfaces, and shell tempering were typical of Sredni
Stog or Cucuteni C. 57

Prominent among these new dark-surfaced, shell-tempered pottery
assemblages were loop-handled drinking cups and tankards called
“Scheibenhenkel,” a new style of liquid containers and servers that ap-
peared throughout the middle and lower Danube valley. Andrew Sherratt
interpreted the Scheibenhenkel horizon as the first clear indicator of a
new custom of drinking intoxicating beverages. 58 The replacement of
highly decorated storage and serving vessels by plain drinking cups could
indicate that new elite drinking rituals had replaced or nudged aside older
household feasts.

The Cernavoda I economy was based primarily on the herding of sheep
and goats. Many horse bones were found at Cernavoda I, and, for the first
time, domesticated horses became a regular element in the animal herds of
the middle and lower Danube valley. 59 Greenfield s zoological studies in
the middle Danube showed that, also for the first time, animals were

End of Old Europe 261

Figure 11.12 Black- or grey-surfaced ceramics from the Cernavoda I settle-
ment, lower Danube valley, about 3900-3600 BCE, including two-handled
tankards. After Morintz and Roman 1968.

butchered at different ages in upland and lowland sites. This suggested
that herders moved animals seasonally between upland and lowland pas-
tures, a form of herding called “transhumant pastoralism.” The new pasto-
ral economy might have been practiced in a new, more mobile way, perhaps
aided by horseback riding. 60

Kurgan graves were created only during the initial Suvorovo penetration.
Afterward the immigrants’ descendants stopped making kurgans. The flat-
grave cemetery of Ostrovul Corbului probably dates to this settling-in pe-
riod, with sixty-three graves, some displaying a posture on the back with
raised knees, others contracted on the side, on the ruins of an abandoned
tell. Cernavoda I flat graves also appeared at the Brailita cemetery, where
the males had wide Proto-Europoid skulls and faces like the steppe Novo-
danilovka population, and the females had gracile Mediterranean faces,
like the Old European Gumelnitsa population.

By about 3600 BCE the Cernavoda I culture developed into Cernavoda
III. Cernavoda III was, in turn, connected with one of the largest and
most influential cultural horizons of eastern Europe, the Baden-Boleraz
horizon, centered in the middle Danube (Hungary) and dated about
3600-3200 BCE. Drinking cups of this culture featured very high strap
handles and were made in burnished grey-black fabrics with channeled
flutes decorating their shoulders. Somewhat similar drinking sets were
made from eastern Austria and Moravia to the mouth of the Danube and
south to the Aegean coast (Dikili Tash IIIA-Sitagroi IV). Horse bones
appeared almost everywhere, with larger sheep interpreted as wool sheep.
At lowland sites in the middle Danube region, 60-91% of the sheep-goat

262 Chapter //

lived to adult ages, suggesting management for secondary products, prob-
ably wool. Similarly 40-50% of the caprids were adults in two late TRB
sites of this same era (Schalkenburg and Bronocice) in upland southern
Poland. After 3600 BCE horses and wool sheep were increasingly com-
mon in eastern Europe.

Pre-Anatolian languages probably were introduced to the lower Dan-
ube valley and perhaps to the Balkans about 4200-4000 BCE by the
Suvorovo migrants. We do not know when their descendants moved into
Anatolia. Perhaps pre-Anatolian speakers founded Troy I in northwest-
ern Anatolia around 3000 BCE. In prayers recited by the later Hittites,
the sun god of heaven, S/us (cognate with Greek Zeus), was described
as rising from the sea. This has always been taken as a fossilized ritual
phrase retained from some earlier pre-Hittite homeland located west of a
large sea. 6 ' The graves of Suvorovo were located west of the Black Sea.
Did the Suvorovo people ride their horses down to the shore and pray to
the rising sun?

1

f

|

\

••

.

*

.

Chapter Twelve

Seeds of Change on the Steppe Borders
Maikop Chiefs and Tripolye Towns

After Old Europe collapsed, the dedication of copper objects in North
Pontic graves declined by almost 80%. 1 Beginning in about 3800 BCE
and until about 3300 BCE the varied tribes and regional cultures of the
Pontic-Caspian steppes seem to have turned their attention away from the
Danube valley and toward their other borders, where significant social and
economic changes were now occurring.

On the southeast, in the North Caucasus Mountains, spectacularly
ostentatious chiefs suddenly appeared among what had been very ordi-
nary small-scale farmers. They displayed gold-covered clothing, gold and
silver staffs, and great quantities of bronze weapons obtained from what
must have seemed beyond the rim of the earth — in fact, from the newly
formed cities of Middle Uruk Mesopotamia, through Anatolian middle-
men. The first contact between southern urban civilizations and the peo-
ple of the steppe margins occurred in about 3700-3500 BCE. It caused a
social and political transformation that was expressed archaeologically as
the Maikop culture of the North Caucasus piedmont. Maikop was the
filter through which southern innovations — including possibly wagons —
first entered the steppes. Sheep bred to grow long wool might have passed
from north to south in return, a little considered possibility. The Maikop
chiefs used a tomb type that looked like an elaborated copy of the
Suvorovo-Novodanilovka kurgan graves of the steppes, and some of them
seem to have moved north into the steppes. A few Maikop traders might
have lived inside steppe settlements on the lower Don River. But, oddly,
very little southern wealth was shared with the steppe clans. The gold,
turquoise, and carnelian stayed in the North Caucasus. Maikop people
might have driven the first wagons into the Eurasian steppes, and they
certainly introduced new metal alloys that made a more sophisticated

263

264 Chapter 12

metallurgy possible. We do not know what they took in return — possibly
wool, possibly horses, possibly even Cannabis or saiga antelope hides,
though there is only circumstantial evidence for any of these. But in most
parts of the Pontic-Caspian steppes the evidence for contact with Mai-
kop is slight — a pot here, an arsenical bronze axe-head there.

On the west, Tripolye (Cl) agricultural towns on the middle Dnieper
began to bury their dead in cemeteries — the first Tripolye communities to
accept the ritual of cemetery burial — and their coarse pottery began to
look more and more like late Sredni Stog pottery. This was the first stage
in the breakdown of the Dnieper frontier, a cultural border that had ex-
isted for two thousand years, and it seems to have signaled a gradual pro-
cess of cross-border assimilation in the middle Dnieper forest-steppe zone.
But while assimilation and incremental change characterized Tripolye
towns on the middle Dnieper frontier, Tripolye towns closer to the steppe
border on the South Bug River ballooned to enormous sizes, more than
350 ha, and, between about 3600 and 3400 BCE, briefly became the larg-
est human settlements in the world. The super towns of Tripolye Cl were
more than 1 km across but had no palaces, temples, town walls, cemeter-
ies, or irrigation systems. They were not cities, as they lacked the central-
ized political authority and specialized economy associated with cities, but
they were actually bigger than the earliest cities in Uruk Mesopotamia.
Most Ukrainian archaeologists agree that warfare and defense probably
were the underlying reasons why the Tripolye population aggregated in
this way, and so the super towns are seen as a defensive strategy in a situa-
tion of confrontation and conflict, either between the Tripolye towns or
between those towns and the people of the steppes, or both. But the strat-
egy failed. By 3300 BCE all the big towns were gone, and the entire
South Bug valley was abandoned by Tripolye farmers.

Finally, on the east, on the Ural River, a section of the Volga-Ural
steppe population decided, about 3500 BCE, to migrate eastward across
Kazakhstan more than 2000 km to the Altai Mountains. We do not know
why they did this, but their incredible trek across the Kazakh steppes led
to the appearance of the Afanasievo culture in the western Gorny Altai.
The Afanasievo culture was intrusive in the Altai, and it introduced a suite
of domesticated animals, metal types, pottery types, and funeral customs
that were derived from the Volga-Ural steppes. This long-distance migra-
tion almost certainly separated the dialect group that later developed into
the Indo-European languages of the Tocharian branch, spoken in Xinji-
ang in the caravan cities of the Silk Road around 500 CE but divided at

Seeds of Change 265

that time into two or three quite different languages, all exhibiting archaic
Indo-European traits. Most studies of Indo-European sequencing put
the separation of Tocharian after that of Anatolian and before any other
branch. The Afanasievo migration meets that expectation. The migrants
might also have been responsible for introducing horseback riding to the
pedestrian foragers of the northern Kazakh steppes, who were quickly
transformed into the horse-riding, wild-horse-hunting Botai culture just
when the Afanasievo migration began.

By this time, early Proto-Indo-European dialects must have been spo-
ken in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, tongues revealing the innovations that
separated all later Indo-European languages from the archaic Proto-Indo-
European of the Anatolian type. The archaeological evidence indicates
that a variety of different regional cultures still existed in the steppes, as
they had throughout the Eneolithic. This regional variability in material
culture, though not very robust, suggests that early Proto-Indo-European
probably still was a regional language spoken in one part of the Pontic-
Caspian steppes — possibly in the eastern part, since this was where the
migration that led to the Tocharian branch began. Groups that distin-
guished themselves by using eastern innovations in their speech probably
were engaging in a political act — allying themselves with specific clans,
their political institutions, and their prestige — and in a religious act —
accepting rituals, songs, and prayers uttered in that eastern dialect. Songs,
prayers, and poetry were central aspects of life in all early Indo-European
societies; they were the vehicle through which the right way of speaking
reproduced itself publicly.

The Five Cultures of the Final
Eneolithic in the Steppes

Much regional diversity and relatively little wealth existed in the Pontic-
Caspian steppes between about 3800 and 3300 BCE (table 12.1). Regional
variants as defined by grave and pot types, which is how archaeologists
define them, had no clearly defined borders; on the contrary, there was a
lot of border shifting and inter-penetration. At least five Final Eneolithic
archaeological cultures have been identified in the Pontic-Caspian steppes
(figure 12.1). Sites of these five groups are sometimes found in the same
regions, occasionally in the same cemeteries; overlapped in time; shared
a number of similarities; and were, in any case, fairly variable. In these
circumstances, we cannot be sure that they all deserve recognition as

Table 12.1

Selected Radiocarbon Dates for Final Eneolithic Sites in the Steppes and Early Bronze
Age Sites in the North Caucasus Piedmont

Lab Number

BP Date

Sample

Calibrated Date

1. Maikop culture

Klady kurgan cemetery, Farsa River valley near Maikop

Le 4529

4960 ±120

Klady k29/l late

bone

3940-3640 BCE

OxA 5059

4835 ±60

Klady kll/50 early

bone

3700-3520 BCE

OxA 5061

4765 ±65

Klady kl 1/55 early

bone

3640-3380 BCE

OxA 5058

4675 ±70

Klady kl 1/43 early

bone

3620-3360 BCE

OxA 5060

4665 ±60

Klady kl 1/48 early

3520-3360 BCE

Le 4528

4620 ±40

Klady k30/l late

bone

3500-3350 BCE

Galugai setdement, upper Tersek River

OxA 3779

4930 ±120

Galugai I

3940-3540 BCE

OxA 3778

4650 ±80

Galugai I

bone

3630-3340 BCE

OxA 3777

4480 ±70

Galugai I

3340-3030 BCE

2.Tripolye Cl settlements

BM-495

4940 ±105

Soroki-Ozero

3940-3630 BCE

UCLA-1642F

4904 ±300

Novorozanovka 2

4100-3300 BCE

Bln-2087

4890 ±50

Maidanets’ke

charcoal

3710-3635 BCE

UCLA-1671 B

4890 ±60

Evminka

3760-3630 BCE

BM-494

4792 ±105

Soroki-Ozero

3690-3370 BCE

UCLA-1466B

4790 ±100

Evminka

3670-3370 BCE

Bln-631

4870±100

Chapaevka

3780-3520 BCE

Ki-880

4810±140

Chapaevka

charcoal

3760-3370 BCE

Ki-1212

4600 ±80

Maidanets’ke

3520-3100 BCE

3. Repin culture

Kyzyl-Khak II settlement, North Caspian desert, lower Volg

a

4900 ±40

house 2

charcoal

3705-3645 BCE

Mikhailovka II setdement, lower part of level II

Ki-8010

4710±80

square 14,2.06m depth

bone

3630-3370 BCE

Podgorovka setdement, Aidar River, Donets River tributary

Ki-7843

4560 ±50

}

3490-3100 BCE

Ki-7841

4370 ±55

3090-2900 BCE

Ki-7842

4330 ±50

}

3020-2880 BCE

4. Late Khvalynsk culture

Kara-Khuduk settlement, North Caspian desert, lower Volga

UPI-431

5100 ±45

pit-house

charcoal

3970-3800 BCE

Seeds of Change 267

ARAL

SEA

Pontic - Caspian Other Cultures:

Steppe Cultures:

1. Mikhailovka I A.TripolyeCI

2. Post-Mariupol big towns

3. Late Sredni Stog B. Maikop

4. Late Khvalynsk C. Botai-Tersek

5. Repin D. Afanasievo

Takla-Makan

Figure 12.1 Final Eneolithic culture areas from the Carpathians to the Altai,
3800-3300 BCE.

different archaeological cultures. But we cannot understand the archaeo-
logical descriptions of this period without them, and together they provide
a good picture of what was happening in the Pontic-Caspian steppes be-
tween 3800 and 3300 BCE. The western groups were engaged in a sort of
two-pronged death dance, as it turned out, with the Cucuteni-Tripolye
culture. The southern groups interacted with Maikop traders. And the
eastern groups cast off a set of migrants who rode across Kazakhstan to a
new home in the Altai, a subject reserved for the next chapter. Horseback
riding is documented archaeologically in Botai-Tersek sites in Kazakh-
stan during this period (chapter 10) and probably appeared earlier, and
so we proceed on the assumption that most steppe tribes were now
equestrian.

Shlyakovskii •
DonR. y

Repin •r'
Razdors'loe

Chapaevka

Maidanets'ke^

Taryankiv^

DobrovodTW^5V

Donets

-N<onstantinovka

Starokorsunskaya

5^ HSvobodi

r~^\^ M^kop*| ^

'CASUS Mt:

268 Chapter 12

T

Figure 12.2 Final Eneolithic sites in the steppes and Early Bronze Age sites in
the North Caucasus piedmont.

The Mikhailovka I Culture

The westernmost of the five Final Eneolithic cultures of the Pontic-
Caspian steppes was the Mikhailovka I culture, also called the Lower
Mikhailovka or Nizhnimikhailovkskii culture, named after a stratified
settlement on the Dnieper located below the Dnieper Rapids (figure
12. 2). 2 Below the last cascade, the river spread out over a broad basin in
the steppes. Braided channels crisscrossed a sandy, marshy, forested low-
land 10-20 km wide and 100 km long, a rich place for hunting and fishing
and a good winter refuge for cattle, now inundated by hydroelectric dams.
Mikhailovka overlooked this protected depression at a strategic river

Seeds of Change 269

crossing. Its initial establishment probably was an outgrowth of increased
east-west traffic across the river. It was the most important settlement on
the lower Dnieper from the Late Eneolithic through the Early Bronze
Age, about 3700-2500 BCE. Mikhailovka I, the original settlement, was
occupied about 3700-3400 BCE, contemporary with late Tripolye B2 and
early Cl, late Sredni Stog, and early Maikop. A few late Sredni Stog and
Maikop pottery sherds occurred in the occupation layer at Mikhailovka I.
A whole Maikop pot was found in a grave with Mikhailovka I sherds at
Sokolovka on the Ingul River, in kurgan 1, grave 6a. Tripolye B2 and Cl
pots also are found in Mikhailovka I graves. These exchanges of pottery
show that the Mikhailovka I culture had at least sporadic contacts with
Tripolye B2/C1 towns, the Maikop culture, and late Sredni Stog commu-
nities. 3

The people of Mikhailovka I cultivated cereal crops. At Mikhailovka I,
imprints of cultivated seeds were found on 9 pottery sherds of 2,461 ex-
amined, or 1 imprint in 273 sherds. 4 The grain included emmer wheat,
barley, millet, and 1 imprint of a bitter vetch seed ( Vicia ervilia ), a crop
grown today for animal fodder. Zoologists identified 1,166 animal bones
(NISP) from Mikhailovka I, of which 65% were sheep-goat, 19% cattle,
9% horse, and less than 2% pig. Wild boar, aurochs, and saiga antelope
were hunted occasionally, accounting for less than 5 percent of the animal
bones.

The high number of sheep-goat at Mikhailovka I might suggest that
long-wool sheep were present. Wool sheep probably were present in the
North Caucasus at Svobodnoe (see below) by 4000 BCE, and almost cer-
tainly were in the Danube valley during the Cernavoda III-Boleraz pe-
riod around 3600-3200 BCE, so wool sheep could have been kept at
Mikhailovka I. But even if long-wool sheep were bred in the steppes dur-
ing this period, they clearly were not yet the basis for a widespread new
wool economy, because cattle or even deer bones still outnumbered sheep
in other steppe settlements. 5

Mikhailovka I pottery was shell-tempered and had dark burnished sur-
faces, usually unornamented (figure 12.3). Common shapes were egg-
shaped pots or flat-based, wide-shouldered tankards with everted rims. A
few silver ornaments and one gold ring, quite rare in the Pontic steppes of
this era, were found in Mikhailovka I graves.

Mikhailovka I kurgans were distributed trom the lower Dnieper west-
ward to the Danube delta and south to the Crimean peninsula, north and
northwest of the Black Sea. Near the Danube they were interspersed with
cemeteries that contained Danubian Cernavoda I— III ceramics. 6 Most

Seeds of Change 271

Figure 12.3 Ceramics from the Mikhailovka I settlement, after Lagodovs-
kaya, Shaposhnikova, and Makarevich 1959; and a Mikhailovka 1 grave (gr.
6) stratified above an older Eneolithic grave (gr. 6a) at Sokolovka kurgan on
the Ingul River west of the Dnieper, after Sharafutdinova 1980.

Mikhailovka 1 kurgans were low mounds of black earth covered by a layer
of clay, surrounded by a ditch and a stone cromlech, often with an opening
on the southwest side. The graves frequently were in cists lined with stone
slabs. The body could be in an extended supine position or contracted on
the side or supine with raised knees, although the most common pose was
contracted on the side. Occasionally (e.g., Olaneshti, k. 2, gr. 1, on the
lower Dniester) the grave was covered by a stone anthropomorphic stela —
a large stone slab carved at the top into the shape of a head projecting

above rounded shoulders (see figure 13.11). This was the beginning of a
long and important North Pontic tradition of decorating some graves with
carved stone stelae/

The skulls and faces of some Mikhailovka I people were delicate and
narrow. The skeletal anthropologist Ina Potekhina established that an-
other North Pontic culture, the Post-Mariupol culture, looked most like
the old wide-faced Suvorovo-Novodanilovka population. The Mikhailovka
1 people, who lived in the westernmost steppes closest to the Tripolye cul-
ture and to the lower Danube valley, seem to have intermarried more with
people from Tripolye towns or people whose ancestors had lived in Danu-
bian tells. 8

The Mikhailovka I culture was replaced by the Usatovo culture in the
steppes northwest of the Black Sea after about 3300 BCE. Usatovo re-
tained some Mikhailovka I customs, such as making a kurgan with a sur-
rounding stone cromlech that was open to the southwest. The Usatovo
culture was led by a warrior aristocracy centered on the lower Dniester
estuary that probably regarded Tripolye agricultural townspeople as
tribute-paying clients, and that might have begun to engage in sea trade
along the coast. People in the Crimean peninsula retained many
Mikhailovka I customs and developed into the Kemi-Oba culture of the
Early Bronze Age after about 3300 BCE. These EBA cultures will be
described in a later chapter.

The Post-Mariupol Culture

The clumsiest culture name of the Final Eneolithic is the “Post-Mariupol”
or “Extended-Position-Grave” culture, both names conveying a hint of
definitional uncertainty. Rassamakin called it the “Kvityana” culture. I
will use the name “Post-Mariupol.” All these names refer to a grave type
recognized in the steppes just above the Dnieper Rapids in the 1970s but
defined in various ways since then. N. Ryndina counted about three hun-
dred graves of the Post-Mariupol type in the steppes from the Dnieper
valley eastward to the Donets. They were covered by low kurgans, occa-
sionally surrounded by a stone cromlech. Burial was in an extended supine
position in a narrow oblong or rectangular pit, often lined with stone and
covered with wooden beams or stone slabs. Usually there were no ceramics
in the grave (although this rule was fortunately broken in a few graves),
but a fire was built above the grave; red ochre was strewn heavily on the
grave floor; and lamellar flint blades, bone beads, or a few small copper

2 j 2 Chapter 12

Figure 12.4 Post-Mariupol ceramics and graves: left, Marievka kurgan 14,
grave 7; upper right , Bogdanovskogo Karera Kurgan 2, graves 2 and 17; lower
right , pots from Chkalovskaya kurgan 3. After Nikolova and Rassamakin
1985, figure 7.

beads or twists were included (figure 12.4). Three cattle skulls, presumably
sacrificed at the funeral, were placed at the edge of one grave at Ch-
kalovska kurgan 3. The largest cluster is just north of the Dnieper Rapids
on the east side of the Dnieper, between two tributary rivers, the Samara
(smaller than the Volga-region Samara River) and the Orel. Two chrono-
logical phases are identified: an early (Final Eneolithic) phase contempo-
rary with Tripolye B2/C1, about 3800-3300 BCE; and a later (Early
Bronze Age) phase contemporary with Tripolye C2 and the Early Yamnaya
horizon, about 3300-2800 BCE. 9

Seeds of Change 27J

About 40 percent of the Post-Mariupol graves in the core Orel-Samara
region contained copper ornaments, usually just one or two. All forty-six
of the copper objects examined by Ryndina from early-phase graves were
made from “clean” Transylvanian ores, the same ores used in Tripolye B2
and Cl sites. The copper in the second phase, however, was from two
sources: ten objects still were made of “clean” Transylvanian copper but
twenty-three were made of arsenical bronze. They were most similar to
the arsenical bronzes of the Ustatovo settlement or the late Maikop cul-
ture. Only one Post-Mariupol object (a small willow-leaf pendant from
Bulakhovka kurgan cemetery I, k. 3, gr. 9) looked metallurgical^ like a
direct import from late Maikop. 10

Two Post-Mariupol graves were metalsmiths’ graves. They contained
three bivalve molds for making sleeved axes. (A sleeved axe had a single
blade with a cast sleeve hole for the handle on one side.) The molds copied
a late Maikop axe type but were locally made. 11 They probably were late
Post-Mariupol, after 3300 BCE. They are the oldest known two-sided
ceramic molds in the steppes, and they were buried with stone hammers,
clay tubes or tulieres for bellows attachments, and abrading stones. These
kits suggest a new level of technological skill among steppe metalsmiths
and the graves began a long tradition of the smith being buried with his
tools.

The Late Sredni Stog Culture

The third and final culture group in the western part of the Pontic-
Caspian steppes was the late Sredni Stog culture. Late Sredni Stog
pottery was shell-tempered and often decorated with cord-impressed
geometric designs (see figure 11.7), quite unlike the plain, dark-surfaced
pots of Mikhailovka I and the Post-Mariupol culture. The late Sredni
Stog settlement of Moliukhor Bugor was located on the Dnieper in the
forest-steppe zone. A Tripolye Cl vessel was found there. The people of
Moliukhor Bugor lived in a house 15 m by 12 m with three internal
hearths, hunted red deer and wild boar, fished, kept a lot of horses and a
few domesticated cattle and sheep, and grew grain. Eight grain impres-
sions were found among 372 sherds (one imprint in 47 sherds), a higher
frequency than at Mikhailovka I. They included emmer wheat, einkorn
wheat, millet, and barley. The well-known Sredni Stog settlement at
Dereivka was occupied somewhat earlier, about 4000 BCE, but also
produced many flint blades with sickle gloss and six stone querns for
grinding grain, and so also probably included some grain cultivation.

Seeds of Change 275

274 Chapter 12

Horses represented 63% of the animal bones at Dereivka (see chapter
10). The Sredni Stog societies on the Dnieper, like the other western steppe
groups, had a mixed economy that combined grain cultivation, stock-
breeding, horseback riding, and hunting and fishing.

Late Sredni Stog sites were located in the northern steppe and southern
forest-steppe zones on the middle Dnieper, north of the Post-Mariupol and
Mikhailovka I groups. Sredni Stog sites also extended from the Dnieper
eastward across the middle Donets to the lower Don. The most impor-
tant stratified settlement on the lower Don was Razdorskoe [raz-DOR-
sko-ye]. Level 4 at Razdorskoe contained an early Khvalynsk component,
level 5 above it had an early Sredni Stog (Novodanilovka period) occupa-
tion, and, after that, levels 6 and 7 had pottery that resembled late Sredni
Stog mixed with imported Maikop pottery. A radiocarbon date said to
be associated with level 6, on organic material in a core removed for pol-
len studies, produced a date of 3500-2900 BCE (4490±180 BP). Near
Razdorskoe was the fortified settlement at Konstantinovka. Here, in a
place occupied by people who made similar lower-Don varieties of late
Sredni Stog pottery, there might actually have been a small Maikop
colony. 12

Bodies buried in Sredni Stog graves usually were in the supine-with-
raised knees position that was such a distinctive aspect of steppe burials
beginning with Khvalynsk. The grave floor was strewn with red ochre,
and the body often was accompanied by a unifacial flint blade or a broken
pot. Small mounds sometimes were raised over late Sredni Stog graves,
but in many cases they were flat.

Repin and Late Khvalynsk in the Lower Don-Volga Steppes

The two eastern groups can be discussed together. They are identified with
two quite different kinds of pottery. One type clearly resembled a late va-
riety of Khvalynsk pottery. The other type, called Repin, probably began
on the middle Don, and is identified by round-based pots with cord-
impressed decoration and decorated rims.

Repin, excavated in the 1950s, was located 250 km upstream from
Razdorskoe, on the middle Don at the edge of the feather-grass steppe.
At Repin 55% of the animal bones were horse bones. Horse meat was
much more important in the diet than the meat of cattle (18%), sheep-
goat (9%), pigs (9%), or red deer (9%). 13 Perhaps Repin specialized in
raising horses for export to North Caucasian traders (?).The pottery from

Repin defined a type that has been found at many sites in the Don-Volga
region. Repin pottery sometimes is found stratified beneath Yamnaya
pottery, as at the Cherkasskaya settlement on the middle Don in the
Voronezh oblast. 14 Repin components occur as far north as the Samara
oblast in the middle Volga region, at sites such as Lebyazhinka I on the
Sok River, in contexts also thought to predate early Yamnaya. The Afa-
nasievo migration to the Altai was carried out by people with a Repin-
type material culture, probably from the middle Volga-Ural region. On
the lower Volga, a Repin antelope hunters’ camp was excavated at Kyzyl
Khak, where 62% of the bones were saiga antelope (figure 12.5). Cattle
were 13%, sheep 9%, and horses and onagers each about 7%. A radiocar-
bon date (4900 ±40 BP) put the Repin occupation at Kyzyl-Khak at
about 3700-3600 BCE.

Kara Khuduk was another antelope hunters’ camp on the lower Volga
but was occupied by people who made late Khvalynsk- type pottery (figure
12.5). A radiocarbon date (5100145 BP, UPI 430) indicated that it was
occupied in about 3950-3800 BCE, earlier than the Repin occupation at
Kyzyl-Khak nearby. Many large scrapers, possibly for hide processing,
were found among the flint tools. Saiga antelope hides seem to have been
highly desired, perhaps for trade. The animal bones were 70% saiga ante-
lope, 13% cattle, and 6% sheep. The ceramics (670 sherds from 30-35 ves-
sels) were typical Khvalynsk ceramics: shell-tempered, round-bottomed
vessels with thick, everted lips, covered with comb stamps and corded-
impressed U-shaped “caterpillar” impressions.

Late Khvalynsk graves without kurgans were found in the 1990s at
three sites on the lower Volga: Shlyakovskii, Engels, and Rovnoe. The
bodies were positioned on the back with knees raised, strewn with red
ochre, and accompanied by lamellar flint blades, flint axes with polished
edges, polished stone mace heads of Khvalynsk type, and bone beads. Late
Khvalynsk populations lived in scattered enclaves on the lower Volga.
Some of them crossed the northern Caspian, perhaps by boat, and estab-
lished a group of camps on its eastern side, in the Mangyshlak peninsula.

The Volga-Don late Khvalynsk and Repin societies played a central role
in the evolution of the Early Bronze Age Yamnaya horizon beginning
around 3300 BCE (discussed in the next chapter). One kind of early Yam-
naya pottery was really a Repin type, and the other kind was actually a
late Khvalynsk type; so, if no other clues are present, it can be difficult to
separate Repin or late Khvalynsk pottery from early Yamnaya pottery.
The Yamnaya horizon probably was the medium through which late

Figure 12.5 Repin pottery from Kyzl-Khak {top) and late Khvalynsk pottery
and settlement plan from Kara-Khuduk {bottom) on the lower Volga. After
Barynkin, Vasiliev, and Vybornov 1998, figures 5 and 6.

Seeds of Change 277

Proto-Indo-European languages spread across the steppes. This implies
that classic Proto-Indo-European dialects were spoken among the Repin
and late Khvalynsk groups. 15

Crisis and Change on theTripolye Frontier:

Towns Bigger Than Cities

Two notable and quite different kinds of changes affected the Tripolye
culture between about 3700 and 3400 BCE. First, the Tripolye settle-
ments in the forest-steppe zone on the middle Dnieper began to make
pottery that looked like Pontic-Caspian ceramics (dark, occasionally shell-
tempered wares) and adopted Pontic-Caspian-style inhumation funerals.
The Dnieper frontier became more porous, probably through gradual
assimilation. But Tripolye settlements on the South Bug River, near the
steppe border, changed in very different ways. They mushroomed to enor-
mous sizes, more than 400 ha, twice the size of the biggest cities in Meso-
potamia. Simply put, they were the biggest human settlements in the
world. And yet, instead of evolving into cities, they were abruptly aban-
doned.

Contact with Sredni Stog on the Dnieper Frontier

Chapaevka was a Tripolye B2/C1 settlement of eleven dwellings located on
a promontory west of the Dnieper valley in the northern forest-steppe
zone. It was occupied about 3700-3400 BCE. 16 Chapaevka is the earliest
known Tripolye community to adopt cemetery burial (figure 12.6). A cem-
etery of thirty-two graves appeared on the edge of settlement. The form of
burial, in an extended supine position, usually with a pot, sometimes with
a piece of red ochre under the head or chest, was not exactly like any of the
steppe grave types, but just the acceptance of the burial of the body was a
notable change from the Old European funeral customs of the Tripolye
culture. Chapaevka also had lightly built houses with dug-out floors rather
than houses with plastered log floors {ploshchadka). Tripolye Cl pottery was
found at Moliukhor Bugor, about 150 km to the south, perhaps the source
of some of these new customs.

Most of the ceramics in the Chapaevka houses were well-fired fine
wares with fine sand temper or very fine clay fabrics (50-70%), of which a
small percentage (1-10%) were painted with standard Tripolye designs;
but generally they were black to grey in color, with burnished surfaces, and

2y8 Chapter 12

Chapaevka settlement f^i fo~i r^i
houses pits graves

Figure 12.6 Tripolye Cl settlement at Chapaevka on the Dnieper with
eleven houses (features I-XI) and cemetery (gr. 1-32) and ceramics.
After Kruts 1977, figures 5 and 16.

Seeds of Change 27 9

were often undecorated. They were quite different from the orange wares
that had typified earlier Tripolye ceramics. Undecorated grey-to-black
ware also was typical of the Mikhailovka I and Post-Mariupol cultures,
although their shapes and clay fabrics differed from most of those of the
Tripolye Cl culture. One class of Chapaevka kitchen-ware pots with ver-
tical combed decoration on the collars looked so much like late Sredni
Stog pots that it is unclear whether this kind of ware was borrowed from
Tripolye by late Sredni Stog potters or by Tripolye Cl potters from late
Sredni Stog. 17 Around 3700-3500 BCE the Dnieper frontier was becom-
ing a zone of gradual, probably peaceful assimilation between Tripolye
villagers and indigenous Sredni Stog societies east of the Dnieper.

Towns Bigger Than Cities: The Tripolye Cl Super Towns

Closer to the steppe border things were quite different. All the Tripolye
settlements located between the Dnieper and South Bug rivers, including
Chapaevka, were oval, with houses arranged around an open central plaza.
Some villages occupied less than 1 ha, many were towns of 8-15 ha, some
were more than 100 ha, and a group of three Tripolye Cl sites located
within 20 km of one another reached sizes of 250-450 ha between about
3700 and 3400 BCE. These super sites were located in the hills east of the
South Bug River, near the edge of the steppe in the southern forest-steppe
zone. They were the largest communities not just in Europe but in the
world. 18

The three known super-sites — Dobrovodi (250 ha), Maidanets’ke (250
ha), and Talyanki (450 ha) — perhaps were occupied sequentially in that or-
der. None of these sites contained an obvious administrative center, palace,
storehouse, or temple. They had no surrounding fortification wall or moat,
although the excavators Videiko and Shmagli described the houses in the
outer ring as joined in a way that presented an unbroken two-story-high
wall pierced only by easily defended radial streets. The most thoroughly
investigated of the three, Maidanets’ke, covered 250 ha. Magnetometer
testing revealed 1,575 structures (figure 12.7). Most were inhabited simulta-
neously (there was almost no overbuilding of newer houses over older ones)
by a population estimated at fifty-five hundred to seventy-seven hundred
people. Using Bibikovs estimate of 0.6 ha of cultivated wheat per person per
year, a population of that magnitude would have required 3,300-4,620 ha
of cultivated fields each year, which would have necessitated cultivating
fields more than 3 km from the town. 18 The houses were built close to one
another in concentric oval rings, on a common plan, oriented toward a cen-

280 Chapter 12

Figure 12.7 Hie Tripolye Cl Maidanets’ke settlement, with 1,575 structures
mapped by magnetometers: left, smaller houses cluster around larger houses,
thought to be clan or sub-clan centers; right: a house group very well pre-
served by the Yamnaya kurgan built on top of it, showing six inserted late

Seeds of Change 281

tral plaza. The excavated houses were large, 5-8 m wide and 20-30 m long,
and many were two-storied. Videiko and Shmagli suggested a political orga-
nization based on clan segments. They documented the presence of one
larger house for each five to ten smaller houses. The larger houses usually
contained more female figurines (rare in most houses), more fine painted
pots, and sometimes facilities such as warp-weighted looms. Each large
house could have been a community center for a segment of five to ten
houses, perhaps an extended family (or a “super-family collective,” in Videikos
words). If the super towns were organized in this way, a council of 150-300
segment leaders would have made decisions for the entire town. Such an
unwieldy system of political management could have contributed to its own
collapse. After Maidanests’ke and Talyanki were abandoned, the largest
town in the South Bug hills was Kasenovka (120 ha, with seven to nine
concentric rings of houses), dated to the Tripolye C1/C2 transition, perhaps
3400-3300 BCE. When Kasenovka was abandoned, Tripolye people evac-
uated most of the South Bug valley.

Specialized craft centers appeared in Tripolye Cl communities for making
flint tools, weaving, and manufacturing ceramics. These crafts became spa-
tially segregated both within and between towns. 20 A hierarchy appeared in
settlement sizes, comprised of two and perhaps three tiers. These kinds of
changes usually are interpreted as signs of an emerging political hierarchy
and increasing centralization of political power. But, as noted, instead of de-
veloping into cities, the towns were abandoned.

Population concentration is a standard response to increased warfare
among tribal agriculturalists, and the subsequent abandonment of these
places suggests that warfare and raiding was at the root of the crisis. The
aggressors could have been steppe people of Mikhailovka I or late Sredni
Stog type. A settlement at Novorozanovka on the Ingul, west of the
Dnieper, produced a lot of late Sredni Stog cord-impressed pottery, some
Mikhailovka I pottery, and a few imported Tripolye Cl painted fine pots.
Mounted raiding might have made it impossible to cultivate fields more
than 3 km from the town. Raiding for cattle or captives could have caused
the fragmentation and dispersal of the Tripolye population and the aban-
donment of town-based craft traditions just as it had in the Danube valley

Figure 12. 7 {continued) Yamnaya graves. Artifacts from the settlement: top
center \ a cast copper axe; central row , a polished stone axe and two clay loom
weights; bottom row , selected painted ceramics. After Shmagli and Videiko
1987; and Videiko 1990.

282 Chapter 12

some five hundred years earlier. Farther north, in the forest-steppe zone
on the middle Dnieper, assimilation and exchange led ultimately in the
same direction but more gradually.

The First Cities and Their Connection to the Steppes

Steppe contact with the civilizations of Mesopotamia was, of course,
much less direct than contact with Tripolye societies, but the southern
door might have been the avenue through which wheeled vehicles first
appeared in the steppes, so it was important. Our understanding of these
contacts with the south has been completely rewritten in recent years.

Between 3700 and 3500 BCE the first cities in the world appeared
among the irrigated lowlands of Mesopotamia. Old temple centers like
Uruk and Ur had always been able to attract thousands of laborers from
the farms of southern Iraq for building projects, but we are not certain
why they began to live around the temples permanently (figure 12.8). This
shift in population from the rural villages to the major temples created the
first cities. During the Middle and Late Uruk periods (3700-3100 BCE)
trade into and out of the new cities increased tremendously in the form
of tribute, gift exchange, treaty making, and the glorification of the city
temple and its earthly authorities. Precious stones, metals, timber, and raw
wool (see chapter 4) were among the imports. Woven textiles and manu-
factured metal objects probably were among the exports. During the Late
Uruk period, wheeled vehicles pulled by oxen appeared as a new technol-
ogy for land transport. New accounting methods were developed to keep
track of imports, exports, and tax payments — cylinder seals for marking
sealed packages and the sealed doors of storerooms, clay tokens indicating
package contents, and, ultimately, writing.

The new cities had enormous appetites for copper, gold, and silver. Their
agents began an extraordinary campaign, or perhaps competing campaigns
by different cities, to obtain metals and semiprecious stones. The native
chiefdoms of Eastern Anatolia already had access to rich deposits of cop-
per ore, and had long been producing metal tools and weapons. Emissaries
from Uruk and other Sumerian cities began to appear in northern cities
like Tell Brak and Tepe Gawra. South Mesopotamian garrisons built and
occupied caravan forts on the Euphrates in Syria at Habubu Kabira. The
“Uruk expansion” began during the Middle Uruk period about 3700
BCE and greatly intensified during Late Uruk, about 3350-3100 BCE.
The city of Susa in southwestern Iran might have become an Uruk colony.
East of Susa on the Iranian plateau a series of large mudbrick edifices

Seeds of Change 28J

Maidenets'ke

^7rurR\

Vllsatovo/

jKonstantinovka*X—

fMikhailovka^^^

ARAL

SEA

Novowoboanaya

.Berikldeebi

Parkhai

-/AlikemekTepesi

LAKE \

\UHMIA V

Shah Tepe

Arslantepei

Se Girdan
'Gawra

Hacinebi

Hissar

Habuba Kabira

Godin

I ILE DELTA

Malyan

Figure 12.8 Maikop culture and selected sites associated with the Uruk

expansion.

rose above the plains, protecting specialized copper production facilities
that operated partly for the Uruk trade, regulated by local chiefs who
used the urban tools of trade management: seals, sealed packages, sealed
storerooms, and, finally, writing. Copper, lapis lazuli, turquoise, chlo-
rite, and carnelian moved under their seals to Mesopotamia. Uruk-related
trade centers on the Iranian plateau included Sialk IV,, Tal-i-Iblis V-VI,
and Hissar II in central Iran. The tentacles of trade reached as far north-
east as the settlement of Sarazm in the Zerafshan Valley of modern Ta-
jikistan, probably established to control turquoise deposits in the deserts
nearby.

The Uruk expansion to the northwest, toward the gold, silver, and cop-
per sources in the Caucasus Mountains, is documented at two important
local strongholds on the upper Euphrates. Hacinebi was a fortified center
with a large-scale copper production industry. Its chiefs began to deal
with Middle Uruk traders during its phase B2, dated about 3700-3300
BCE. More than 250 km farther up the Euphrates, high in the mountains

284 Chapter 12

of Eastern Anatolia, the stronghold at Arslantepe expanded in wealth
and size at about the same time (Phase VII), although it retained its own
native system of seals, architecture, and administration. It also had its
own large-scale copper production facilities based on local ores. Phase
VIA, beginning about 3350 BCE, was dominated by two new pillared
buildings similar to Late Uruk temples. In them officials regulated trade
using some Uruk-style seals (among many local-style seals) and gave out
stored food in Uruk-type, mass-produced ration bowls. The herds of Ar-
slantepe VII had been dominated by cattle and goats, but in phase VIA
sheep rose suddenly to become the most numerous and important animal,
probably for the new industry of wool production. Horses also appeared,
in very small numbers, at Arslantepe VII and VIA and Hacinebi phase
B, but they seem not to have been traded southward into Mesopotamia.
The Uruk expansion ended abruptly about 3100 BCE for reasons that
remain obscure. Arslantepe and Hacinebi were burned and destroyed,
and in the mountains of eastern Anatolia local Early Trans-Caucasian
(ETC) cultures built their humble homes over the ruins of the grand
temple buildings. 21

Societies in the mountains to the north of Arslantepe responded in vari-
ous ways to the general increase in regional trade that began about 3700-
3500 BCE. Novel kinds of public architecture appeared. At Berikldeebi,
northwest of modern Tbilisi in Georgia, a settlement that had earlier con-
sisted of a few flimsy dwellings and pits was transformed about 3700-
3500 BCE by the construction of a massive mudbrick wall that enclosed
a public building, perhaps a temple, measuring 14.5x7.5 m (50x25 ft).
At Sos level Va near Erzerum in northeastern Turkey there were similar
architectural hints of increasing scale and power. 22 But neither prepares
us for the funerary splendor of the Maikop culture.

The Maikop culture appeared about 3700-3500 BCE in the piedmont
north of the North Caucasus Mountains, overlooking the Pontic-Caspian
steppes. The semi-royal figure buried under the giant Maikop chieftan’s kur-
gan acquired and wore Mesopotamian ornaments in an ostentatious funeral
display that had no parallel that has been preserved even in Mesopotamia.
Into the grave went a tunic covered with golden lions and bulls, silver-
sheathed staffs mounted with solid gold and silver bulls, and silver sheet-
metal cups. Wheel-made pottery was imported from the south, and the new
technique was used to make Maikop ceramics similar to some of the vessels
found at Berikldeebi and at Arslantepe VII/VIA. 23 New high-nickel arseni-
cal bronzes and new kinds of bronze weapons (sleeved axes, tanged daggers)
also spread into the North Caucasus from the south, and a cylinder seal from

Seeds of Change 285

the south was worn as a bead in another Maikop grave. What kinds of soci-
eties lived in the North Caucasus when this contact began?

The North Caucasus Piedmont:

Eneolithic Farmers before Maikop

The North Caucasian piedmont separates naturally into three geographic
parts. The western part is drained by the Kuban River, which flows into
the Sea of Azov. The central part is a plateau famous for its bubbling hot
springs, with resort towns like Mineralnyi Vody (Mineral Water) and
Kislovodsk (Sweet Water). The eastern part is drained by the Terek River,
which flows into the Caspian Sea. The southern skyline is dominated by
the permanently glaciated North Caucasus Mountains, which rise to icy
peaks more than 5,600 m (18,000 ft) high; and off* to the north are the
rolling brown plains of the steppes.

Herding, copper-using cultures lived here by 5000 BCE. The Early
Eneolithic cemetery at Nalchik and the cave occupation at Kammenomost
Cave (chapter 9) date to this period. Beginning about 4400-4300 BCE
the people of the North Caucasus began to settle in fortified agricultural
villages such as Svobodnoe and Meshoko (level 1) in the west, Zamok on
the central plateau, and Ginchi in Dagestan in the east, near the Caspian.
About ten settlements of the Svobodnoe type, of thirty to forty houses
each, are known in the Kuban River drainage, apparently the most densely
settled region. Their earthen or stone walls enclosed central plazas sur-
rounded by solid wattle-and-daub houses. Svobodnoe, excavated by A.
Nekhaev, is the best-reported site (figure 12.9). Half the animal bones
from Svobodnoe were from wild red deer and boar, so hunting was impor-
tant. Sheep were the most important domesticated animal, and the pro-
portion of sheep to goats was 5:1, which suggests that sheep were kept for
wool. But pig keeping also was important, and pigs were the most impor-
tant meat animals at the settlement of Meshoko.

Svobodnoe pots were brown to orange in color and globular with everted
rims, but decorative styles varied greatly between sites (e.g., Zamok, Svo-
bodnoe, and Meshoko are said to have had quite different domestic pot-
tery types). Female ceramic figurines suggest female-centered domestic
rituals. Bracelets carved and polished of local serpentine were manufac-
tured in the hundreds at some sites. Cemeteries are almost unknown, but
a few individual graves found among later graves under kurgans in the
Kuban region have been ascribed to the Late Eneolithic. The Svobodnoe
culture differed from Repin or late Khvalynsk steppe cultures in its house

286 Chapter 12

Figure 12.9 Svobodnoe settlement and ceramics, North Caucasus. After
Nekhaev 1992.

forms, settlement types, pottery, stone tools, and ceramic female figurines.
Probably it was distinct ethnically and linguistically. 24

Nevertheless, the Svobodnoe culture was in contact with the steppes. A
Svobodnoe pot was deposited in the rich grave at Novodanilovka in the
Azov steppes, and a copper ring made of Balkan copper, traded through
the Novodanilovka network, was found at Svobodnoe. Potsherds that look
like early Sredni Stog types were noted at Svobodnoe and Meshoko 1.
Green serpentine axes from the Caucasus appeared in several steppe graves
and in settlements of the early Sredni Stog culture (Strilcha Skelya, Alek-
sandriya, Yama). The Svobodnoe-era settlements in the Kuban River valley
participated in the eastern fringe of the steppe Suvorovo-Novodanilovka
activities around 4000 BCE.

Seeds of Change 287

The Maikop Culture

The shift from Svobodnoe to Maikop was accompanied by a sudden
change in funeral customs — the clear and widespread adoption of kurgan
graves — but there was continuity in settlement locations and settlement
types, lithics, and some aspects of ceramics. Early Maikop ceramics showed
some similarities with Svobodnoe pot shapes and clay fabrics, and some
similarities with the ceramics of the Early Trans-Caucasian (ETC) cul-
ture south of the North Caucasus Mountains. These analogies indicate
that Maikop developed from local Caucasian origins. But some Maikop
pots were wheel-made, a new technology introduced from the south, and
this new method of manufacture probably encouraged new vessel shapes.

The Maikop chieftains grave, discovered on the Belaya River, a tributary
of the Kuban River, was the first Maikop-culture tomb to be excavated,
and it remains the most important early Maikop site. When excavated in
1897 by N. I. Veselovskii, the kurgan was almost 11m high and more than
100 m in diameter. The earthen center was surrounded by a cromlech of
large undressed stones. Externally it looked like the smaller Mikhailovka I
and Post-Mariupol kurgans (and, before them, the Suvorovo kurgans),
which also had earthen mounds surrounded by stone cromlechs. Internally,
however, the Maikop chieftans grave was quite different. The grave cham-
ber was more than 5 m long and 4 m wide, 1.5 m deep, and was lined with
large timbers. It was divided by timber partitions into two northern cham-
bers and one southern chamber. The two northern chambers each held an
adult female, presumably sacrificed, each lying in a contracted position on
her right side, oriented southwest, stained with red ochre, with one to four
pottery vessels and wearing twisted silver foil ornaments. 25

The southern chamber contained an adult male. He also probably was
positioned on his right side, contracted, with his head oriented southwest,
the pose of most Maikop burials. He also lay on ground deeply stained with
red ochre. With him were eight red-burnished, globular pottery vessels, the
type collection for Early Maikop; a polished stone cup with a sheet-gold
cover; two arsenical bronze, sheet-metal cauldrons; two small cups of sheet
gold; and fourteen sheet-silver cups, two of which were decorated with im-
pressed scenes of animal processions including a Caucasian spotted panther,
a southern lion, bulls, a horse, birds, and a shaggy animal (bear? goat?)
mounting a tree (figure 12.10). The engraved horse is the oldest clear image
of a post-glacial horse, and it looked like a modern Przewalski: thick neck,
big head, erect mane, and thick, strong legs. The chieftan also had arsenical

Figure 12.10 Early Maikop objects from the chieftain’s grave at Maikop, the
State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; and a seal at lower left from the
early Maikop Krasnogvardeiskoe kurgan, with a comparative seal from Chalco-
lithic Degirmentepe in eastern Anatolia. The lion, bull, necklace, and diadem
are gold; the cup with engraved design is silver; the two pots are ceramic; and

Seeds of Change 289

bronze tools and weapons. They included a sleeved axe, a hoe-like adze, an
axe-adze, a broad spatula- shaped metal blade 47 cm long with rivets for the
attachment of a handle, and two square-sectioned bronze chisels with
round-sectioned butts. Beside him was a bundle of six (or possibly eight)
hollow silver tubes about 1 m long. They might have been silver casings for a
set of six (or eight) wooden staffs, perhaps for holding up a tent that shaded
the chief. Long-horned bulls, two of solid silver and two of solid gold, were
slipped over four of the silver casings through holes in the middle of the
bulls, so that when the staffs were erect the bulls looked out at the visitor.
Each bull figure was sculpted first in wax; very fine clay was then pressed
around the wax figure; this clay was next wrapped in a heavier clay envelope;
and, finally, the clay was fired and the wax burned off — the lost wax method
for making a complicated metal-casting mold. The Maikop chieftains grave
contained the first objects made this way in the North Caucasus. Like the
potters wheel, the arsenical bronze, and the animal procession motifs en-
graved on two silver cups, these innovations came from the south. 26

The Maikop chieftan was buried wearing Mesopotamian symbols of
power — the lion paired with the bull — although he probably never saw a
lion. Lion bones are not found in the North Caucasus. His tunic had sixty-
eight golden lions and nineteen golden bulls applied to its surface. Lion and
bull figures were prominent in the iconography of Uruk Mesopotamia,
Hacinebi, and Arslantepe. Around his neck and shoulders were 60 beads of
turquoise, 1,272 beads of carnelian, and 122 golden beads. Under his skull
was a diadem with five golden rosettes of five petals each on a band of gold
pierced at the ends. The rosettes on the Maikop diadem had no local proto-
types or parallels but closely resemble the eight-petaled rosette seen in
Uruk art. The turquoise almost certainly came from northeastern Iran near
Nishapur or from the Amu Darya near the trade settlement of Sarazm in
modern Tajikistan, two regions famous in antiquity for their turquoise. The
red carnelian came from western Pakistan and the lapis lazuli from eastern
Afghanistan. Because of the absence of cemeteries in Uruk Mesopotamia,
we do not know much about the decorations worn there. The abundant
personal ornaments at Maikop, many of them traded up the Euphrates
through eastern Anatolia, probably were not made just for the barbarians.
They provide an eye-opening glimpse of the kinds of styles that must have
been seen in the streets and temples of Uruk.

Figure 12.10 {continued) the other objects are arsenical bronze. The bronze
blade with silver rivets is 47 cm long and had sharp edges. After Munchaev
1994 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

290 Chapter 12

The Age and Development of the Maikop Culture

The relationship between Maikop and Mesopotamia was misunderstood
until just recently. The extraordinary wealth of the Maikop culture seemed
to fit comfortably in an age of ostentation that peaked around 2500 BCE,
typified by the gold treasures of Troy II and the royal “death-pits” of Ur
in Mesopotamia. But since the 1980s it has slowly become clear that the
Maikop chieftains grave probably was constructed about 3700-3400
BCE, during the Middle Uruk period in Mesopotamia — a thousand years
before Troy II. The archaic style of the Maikop artifacts was recognized in
the 1920s by Rostovtseff, but it took radiocarbon dates to prove him right.
Rezepkin’s excavations at Klady in 1979-80 yielded six radiocarbon dates
averaging between 3700 and 3200 BCE (on human bone, so possibly a
couple of centuries too old because of old carbon contamination from fish
in the diet). These dates were confirmed by three radiocarbon dates also
averaging between 3700 and 3200 BCE at the early Maikop-culture set-
tlement of Galugai, excavated by S. Korenevskii between 1985 and 1991
(on animal bone and charcoal, so probably accurate). Galugai s pot types
and metal types were exactly like those in the Maikop chieftains grave,
the type site for early Maikop. Graves in kurgan 32 at Ust-Dzhegutinskaya
that were stylistically post-Maikop were radiocarbon dated about 3000-
2800 BCE. These dates showed that Maikop was contemporary with the
first cities of Middle and Late Uruk-period Mesopotamia, 3700-3100
BCE, an extremely surprising discovery. 27

The radiocarbon dates were confirmed by an archaic cylinder seal found
in an early Maikop grave excavated in 1984 at Krasnogvardeiskoe, about
60 km north of the Maikop chieftains grave. This grave contained an east
Anatolian agate cylinder seal engraved with a deer and a tree of life. Simi-
lar images appeared on stamp seals at Degirmentepe in eastern Anatolia
before 4000 BCE, but cylinder seals were a later invention, appearing first
in Middle Uruk Mesopotamia. The one from the kurgan at Kransogvar-
deiskoe (Red Guards), perhaps worn as a bead, is among the oldest of the
type (see figure 12:10). 28

The Maikop chieftains grave is the type site for the early Maikop period,
dated between 3700 and 3400 BCE. All the richest graves and hoards of
the early period were in the Kuban River region, but the innovations in
funeral ceremonies, arsenical bronze metallurgy, and ceramics that defined
the Maikop culture were shared across the North Caucasus piedmont to the
central plateau and as far as the middle Terek River valley. Galugai on the
middle Terek River was an early Maikop settlement, with round houses

Seeds of Change 291

6-8 m in diameter scattered 10-20 m apart along the top of a linear ridge.
The estimated population was less than 100 people. Clay, bell-shaped loom
weights indicated vertical looms; four were found in House 2. The ceramic
inventory consisted largely of open bowls (probably food bowls) and globu-
lar or elongated, round-bodied pots with everted rims, fired to a reddish
color; some of these were made on a slow wheel. Cattle were 49% of the
animal bones, sheep-goats were 44%, pigs were 3%, and horses (presum-
ably horses that looked like the one engraved on the Maikop silver cup)
were 3%. Wild boar and onagers were hunted only occasionally. Horse
bones appeared in other Maikop settlements, in Maikop graves (Inozem-
stvo kurgan contained a horse jaw), and in Maikop art, including a frieze of
nineteen horses painted in black and red colors on a stone wall slab inside a
late Maikop grave at Klady kurgan 28 (figure 12.11). The widespread ap-
pearance of horse bones and images in Maikop sites suggested to Chernykh
that horseback riding began in the Maikop period. 29

The late phase of the Maikop culture probably should be dated about
3400-3000 BCE, and the radiocarbon dates from Klady might support
this if they were corrected for reservoir effects. Having no l5 N measure-
ments from Klady, I don’t know if this correction is justified. The type sites
for the late Maikop phase are Novosvobodnaya kurgan 2, located southeast
of Maikop in the Farsa River valley, excavated by N. I. Veselovskii in 1898;
and Klady (figure 12.11), another kurgan cemetery near Novosvobodnaya,
excavated by A. D. Rezepkin in 1979-80. Rich graves containing metals,
pottery, and beads like Novosvobodnaya and Klady occurred across the
North Caucasus piedmont, including the central plateau (Inozemtsvo kur-
gan, near Mineralnyi Vody) and in the Terek drainage (Nalchik kurgan).
Unlike the sunken grave chamber at Maikop, most of these graves were
built on the ground surface (although Nalchik had a sunken grave cham-
ber); and, unlike the timber-roofed Maikop grave, their chambers were
constructed entirely of huge stones. In Novosvobodnaya-type graves the
central and attendant/gift grave compartments were divided, as at Maikop,
but the stone dividing wall was pierced by a round hole. The stone walls of
the Nalchik grave chamber incorporated carved stone stelae like those of
the Mikhailovka I and Kemi-Oba cultures (see figure 13.11).

Arsenical bronze tools and weapons were much more abundant in the
richest late Maikop graves of the Klady-Novosvobodnaya type than they
were in the Maikop chieftain’s grave. Grave 5 in Klady kurgan 31 alone
contained fifteen heavy bronze daggers, a sword 61cm long (the oldest
sword in the world), three sleeved axes and two cast bronze hammer-axes,
among many other objects, for one adult male and a seven-year-old child

Seeds of Change 293

(see figure 12.11). The bronze tools and weapons in other Novosvobodnaya-
phase graves included cast flat axes, sleeved axes, hammer-axes, heavy
tanged daggers with multiple midribs, chisels, and spearheads. The chisels
and spearheads were mounted to their handles the same way, with round
shafts hammered into four-sided contracting bases that fit into a V-shaped
rectangular hole on the handle or spear. Ceremonial objects included
bronze cauldrons, long-handled bronze dippers, and two-pronged bidents
(perhaps forks for retrieving cooked meats from the cauldrons). Ornaments
included beads of carnelian from western Pakistan, lapis lazuli from Af-
ghanistan, gold, rock crystal, and even a bead from Klady made of a human
molar sheathed in gold (the first gold cap!). Late Maikop graves contained
several late metal types — bidents, tanged daggers, metal hammer-axes, and
a spearhead with a tetrahedral tang — that did not appear at Maikop or in
other early sites. Flint arrowheads with deep concave bases also were a late
type, and black burnished pots had not been in earlier Maikop graves. 30

Textile fragments preserved in Novosvobodnaya-type graves included linen
with dyed brown and red stripes (at Klady), a cotton-like textile, and a wool
textile (both at Novosvobodnaya kurgan 2). Cotton cloth was invented in the
Indian subcontinent by 5000 BCE; the piece tentatively identified in the No-
vosvobodnaya royal grave might have been imported from the south. 31

The Road to the Southern Civilizations

The southern wealth that defined the Maikop culture appeared suddenly in
the North Caucasus, and in large amounts. How did this happen, and why?

Figure 12.11 Late Maikop-Novosvobodnaya objects and graves at Klady,
Kuban River drainage, North Caucasus: {Right) plan and section of Klady
kurgan 31 and painted grave wall from Klady kurgan 28 with frieze of red-
and-black horses surrounding a red-and-black humanlike figure; ( left and
bottom ): objects from grave 5, kurgan 31. These included {left) arsenical bronze
sword; {top row , center) two beads of human teeth sheathed in gold, a gold
ring, and three carnelian beads; {second row) five gold rings; {third row) three
rock crystal beads and a cast silver dog; [fourth row) three gold button caps on
wooden cores; {fifth row) gold ring-pendant and two bent silver pins; {sixth
row) carved bone dice; {seventh row) two bronze bidents, two bronze daggers,
a bronze hammer-axe, a flat bronze axe, and two bronze chisels; {eighth row) a
bronze cauldron with repousse decoration; {ninth row) two bronze cauldrons
and two sleeved axes. After Rezepkin 1991, figures 1, 2, 4, 5, 6.

294 Chapter 12

The valuables that seemed the most interesting to Mesopotamian urban
traders were metals and precious stones. The upper Kuban River is a metal-
rich zone. The Elbrusskyi mine on the headwaters of the Kuban, 35 km
northwest of Elbruz Mountain (the highest peak in the North Caucasus)
produces copper, silver, and lead. The Urup copper mine, on the upper Urup
River, a Kuban tributary, had ancient workings that were visible in the early
twentieth century. Granitic gold ores came from the upper Chegem River
near Nalchik. As the metal prospectors who profited from the Uruk metal
trade explored northward, they somehow learned of the copper, silver, and
gold ores on the other side of the North Caucasus Mountains. Possibly they
also pursued the source of textiles made of long-woolen thread.

It is possible that the initial contacts were made on the Black Sea coast,
since the mountains are easy to cross between Maikop and Sochi on the
coast, but much higher and more difficult in the central part of the North
Caucasus farther east. Maikop ceramics have been found north of Sochi
in the Vorontsovskaya and Akhshtyrskaya caves, just where the trail over
the mountains meets the coast. This would also explain why the region
around Maikop initially had the richest graves — if it was the terminal
point for a trade route that passed through eastern Anatolia to western
Georgia, up the coast to Sochi, and then to Maikop. The metal ores came
from deposits located east of Maikop, so if the main trade route passed
through the high passes in the center of the Caucasus ridge we would ex-
pect to see more southern wealth near the mines, not off to the west.

By the late Maikop (Novosvobodnaya) period, contemporary with Late
Uruk, an eastern route was operating as well. Turquoise and carnelian beads
were found at the walled town of Alikemek Tepesi in the Milsk steppe in
Azerbaijan, near the mouth of the Kura River on the Caspian shore. 32
Alikemek Tepesi possibly was a transit station on a trade route that passed
around the eastern end of the North Caucasian ridge. An eastern route
through the Lake Urmia basin would explain the discovery in Iran, south-
west of Lake Urmia, of a curious group of eleven conical, gravel-covered
kurgans known collectively as Se Girdan. Six of them, up to 8.2 m high and
60 m in diameter, were excavated by Oscar Muscarella in 1968 and 1970.
Then thought to date to the Iron Age, they recently have been redated on
the basis of their strong similarities to Novosvobodnaya-Klady graves in the
North Caucasus. 33 The kurgans and grave chambers were made the same
way as those of the Novosvobodnaya-Klady culture; the burial pose was the
same; the arsenical bronze flat axes and short-nosed shaft-hole axes were
similar in shape and manufacture to Novosvobodnaya-Klady types; and
carnelian and gold beads were the same shapes, both containing silver ves-

Seeds of Change 295

sels and fragments of silver tubes. The Se Girdan kurgans could represent
the migration southward of a Klady-type chief, perhaps to eliminate trou-
blesome local middlemen. But the Lake Urmia chiefdom did not last. Mos-
carella counted almost ninety sites of the succeeding Early Trans-Caucasian
Culture (ETC) around the southern Urmia Basin, but none of them had
even small kurgans.

The power of the Maikop chiefs probably grew partly from the aura of
the extraordinary that clung to the exotic objects they accumulated, which
were palpable symbols of their personal connection with powers previously
unknown. 34 Perhaps the extraordinary nature of these objects was one of
the reasons why they were buried with their owners rather than inherited.
Limited use and circulation were common characteristics of objects re-
garded as “primitive valuables.” But the supply of new valuables dried up
when the Late Uruk long-distance exchange system collapsed about 3100
BCE. Mesopotamian cities began to struggle with internal problems that
we can perceive only dimly, their foreign agents retreated, and in the
mountains the people of the ETC attacked and burned Arslantepe and
Hacinebi on the upper Euphrates. Se Girdan stood abandoned. This was
also the end of the Maikop culture.

Maikop-Novosvobodnaya in the Steppes:

Contacts with the North

Valuables of gold, silver, lapis, turquoise, and carnelian were retained ex-
clusively by the North Caucasian individuals in direct contact with the
south and perhaps by those who lived near the silver and copper mines
that fed the southern trade. But a revolutionary new technology for land
transport— wagons— might have been given to the steppes by the Maikop
culture. Traces of at least two solid wooden disc wheels were found in a
late Maikop kurgan on the Kuban River at Starokorsunskaya kurgan 2,
with Novosvobodnaya black-burnished pots. Although not dated directly,
the wooden wheels in this kurgan might be among the oldest in Europe.
Another Novosvobodnaya grave contained a bronze cauldron with a sche-
matic image that seems to portray a cart. It was found at Evdik.

Evdik kurgan 4 was raised by the shore of the Tsagan-Nur lake in the
North Caspian Depression, 350 km north of the North Caucasus piedmont,
in modern Kalmykia. 36 Many shallow lakes dotted the Sarpa Depression,
an ancient channel of the Volga. At Evdik, grave 20 contained an adult
male in a contracted position oriented southwest, the standard Maikop
pose, stained with red ochre, with an early Maikop pot by his feet. This was

Seeds of Change 297

the original grave over which the kurgan was raised. Two other graves fol-
lowed it, without diagnostic grave goods, after which grave 23 was dug into
the kurgan. This was a late Maikop grave. It contained an adult male and a
child buried together in sitting positions, an unusual pose, on a layer of
white chalk and red ochre. In the grave was a bronze cauldron decorated
with an image made in repousse dots. The image seems to portray a yoke, a
wheel, a vehicle body, and the head of an animal (see figure 4.3a). Grave 23
also contained a typical Novosvobodnaya bronze socketed bident, probably
used with the cauldron. And it also had a bronze tanged dagger, a flat axe,
a gold ring with 2.5 twists, a polished black stone pestle, a whetstone, and
several flint tools, all typical Novosvobodnaya artifacts. Evdik kurgan 4
shows a deep penetration of the Novosvobodnaya culture into the lower
Volga steppes. The image on the cauldron suggests that the people who
raised the kurgan at Evdik also drove carts.

Evdik was the richest of the Maikop-Novosvobodnaya kurgans that
appeared in the steppes north of the North Caucasus between 3700 and
3100 BCE. In such places, late Novosvobodnaya people whose speech
would probably be assigned to a Caucasian language family met and spoke
with individuals of the Repin and Late Khvalynsk cultures who probably
spoke Proto-Indo-European dialects. The loans discussed in chapter 5
between archaic Caucasian and Proto-Indo-European languages probably
were words spoken during these exchanges. The contact was most obvious,
and therefore perhaps most direct, on the lower Don.

Trade across a Persistent Cultural Frontier

Konstantinovka, a settlement on the lower Don River, might have contained
a resident group of Maikop people, and there were kurgan graves with Mai-
kop artifacts around the settlement (figure 12.12). About 90% of the settle-
ment ceramics were a local Don-steppe shell-tempered, cord-impressed type
connected with the cultures of the Dnieper-Donets steppes to the west (late
Sredni Stog, according to Telegin). The other 10% were red-burnished early
Maikop wares. Konstantinovka was located on a steep- sided promontory
overlooking the strategic lower Don valley, and was protected by a ditch and
bank. The gallery forests below it were full of deer (31% of the bones) and
—
Figure 12.12 Konstantinovka settlement on the lower Don, with topographic
location and artifacts. Plain pots are Maikop-like; cord-impressed pots are
local. Loom-weights and asymmetrical flint points also are Maikop-like.
Lower right: crucible and bellows fragments. After Kiashko 1994.

298 Chapter 12

the plateau behind it was the edge of a vast grassland rich in horses (10%),
onagers (2%), and herds of sheep/goats (25%). Maikop vistors probably im-
ported the perforated clay loom weights similar to those at Galugai (unique
in the steppes), copper chisels like those at Novosvobodnaya (again, unique
except for two at Usatovo; see chapter 14), and asymmetrical shouldered flint
projectile points very much like those of the Maikop-Novosvobodnaya
graves. But polished stone axes and gouges, a drilled cruciform polished
stone mace head, and boars-tusk pendants were steppe artifact types. Cru-
cibles and slag show that copper working occurred at the site.

A. P. Nechitailo identified dozens of kurgans in the North Pontic steppes
that contained single pots or tools or both that look like imports from
Maikop-Novosvobodnaya, distributed from the Dniester River valley on
the west to the lower Volga on the east. These widespread northern con-
tacts seem to have been most numerous during the Novosvobodnaya/Late
Uruk phase, 3350-3100 BCE. But most of the Caucasian imports ap-
peared singly in local graves and settlements. The region that imported the
largest number of Caucasian arsenical bronze tools and weapons was the
Crimean Peninsula (the Kemi-Oba culture). The steppe cultures of the
Volga-Ural region imported little or no Caucasian arsenical bronze; their
metal tools and weapons were made from local “clean” copper. Sleeved,
one-bladed metal axes and tanged daggers were made across the Pontic-
Caspian steppes in emulation of Maikop-Novosvobodnaya types, but most
were made locally by steppe metalsmiths. 37

What did the Maikop chiefs want from the steppes? One possibility is
drugs. Sherratt has suggested that narcotics in the form of Cannabis were
one of the important exports of the steppes. 38 Another more conventional
trade item could have been wool. We still do not know where wool sheep
were first bred, although it makes sense that northern sheep from the
coldest places would initially have had the thickest wool. Perhaps the
Maikop-trained weavers at Konstantinovka were there with their looms to
make some of the raw wool into large textiles for payment to the herders.
Steppe people had felts or textiles made from narrow strips of cloth, pro-
duced on small, horizontal looms, then stitched together. Large textiles
made in one piece on vertical looms were novelties.

Another possibility is horses. In most Neolithic and earlier Eneolithic sites
across Transcaucasia there were no horse bones. After the evolution of the
ETC culture beginning about 3300 BCE horses became widespread, ap-
pearing in many sites across Transcaucasia. S. Mezhlumian reported horse
bones at ten of twelve examined sites in Armenia dated to the later fourth
millennium BCE. At Mokhrablur one horse had severe wear on a P 7
consistent with bit wear. Horses were bitted at Botai and Kozhai 1 in

Seeds of Change 299

Kazakhstan during the same period, so bit wear at Mokhrablur would not be
unique. At Alikemek Tepesi the horses of the ETC period were thought by
Russian zoologists to be domesticated. Horses the same size as those of De-
reivka appeared as far south as the Malatya-Elazig region in southeastern
Turkey, as at Nor^untepe; and in northwestern Turkey at Demirci Hoyiik.
Although horses were not traded into the lowlands of Mesopotamia this
early, they might have been valuable in the steppe-Caucasian trade. 39

Proto-Indo-European as a Regional
Language in a Changing World

During the middle centuries of the fourth millennium BCE the eques-
trian tribes of the Pontic-Caspian steppes exhibited a lot of material and
probably linguistic variability. They absorbed into their conversations two
quite different but equally surprising developments among their neighbors
to the south, in the North Caucasus piedmont, and to their west, in the
Cucuteni-Tripolye region. From the North Caucasus probably came wag-
ons, and with them ostentatious displays of incredible wealth. In the west,
some Tripolye populations retreated into huge planned towns larger than
any settlements in the world, probably in response to raiding from the
steppes. Other Tripolye towns farther north on the Dnieper began to
change their customs in ceramics, funerals, and domestic architecture to-
ward steppe styles in a slow process of assimilation.

Although regionally varied, steppe cultural habits and customs remained
distinct from those of the Maikop culture. An imported Maikop or No-
vosvobodnaya potsherd is immediately obvious in a steppe grave. Lithics
and weaving methods were different (no loom weights in the steppes), as
were bead and other ornament types, economies and settlement forms, and
metal types and sources. These distinctions persisted in spite of significant
cross-frontier interaction. When Maikop traders came to Konstantinovka,
they probably needed a translator.

The Yamnaya horizon, the material expression of the late Proto-Indo-
European community, grew from an eastern origin in the Don-Volga steppes
and spread across the Pontic-Caspian steppes after about 3300 BCE. Ar-
chaeology shows that this was a period of profound and rapid change along
all the old ethnolinguistic frontiers surrounding the Pontic-Caspian steppes.
Linguistically based reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European society often
suggest a static, homogeneous ideal, but archaeology shows that Proto-
Indo-European dialects and institutions spread through steppe societies
that exhibited significant regional diversity, during a period of far-reaching
social and economic change.

Chapter Thirteen

Wagon Dwellers of the Steppe
The Speakers of Proto-Indo-European

The sight of wagons creaking and swaying across the grasslands amid
herds of wooly sheep changed from a weirdly fascinating vision to a nor-
mal part of steppe life between about 3300 and 3100 BCE. At about the
same time the climate in the steppes became significantly drier and gener-
ally cooler than it had been during the Eneolithic. The shift to drier con-
ditions is dated between 3500 and 3000 BCE in pollen cores in the lower
Don, the middle Volga, and across the northern Kazakh steppes (table
13.1). As the steppes dried and expanded, people tried to keep their ani-
mal herds fed by moving them more frequently. They discovered that with
a wagon you could keep moving indefinitely. Wagons and horseback rid-
ing made possible a new, more mobile form of pastoralism. With a wagon
full of tents and supplies, herders could take their herds out of the river
valleys and live for weeks or months out in the open steppes between
the major rivers — the great majority of the Eurasian steppes. Land that
had been open and wild became pasture that belonged to someone. Soon
these more mobile herding clans realized that bigger pastures and a mobile
home base permitted them to keep bigger herds. Amid the ensuing dis-
putes over borders, pastures, and seasonal movements, new rules were
needed to define what counted as an acceptable move — people began to
manage local migratory behavior. Those who did not participate in these
agreements or recognize the new rules became cultural Others, stimulat-
ing an awareness of a distinctive Yamnaya identity. That awareness prob-
ably elevated a few key behaviors into social signals. Those behaviors
crystallized into a fairly stable set of variants in the steppes around the
lower Don and Volga rivers. A set of dialects went with them, the speech
patterns of late Proto-Indo-European. This is the sequence of changes that
I believe created the new way of life expressed archaeologically in the
Yamnaya horizon, dated about 3300-2500 BCE (figure 13.1). The spread

?oo

Wagon Dwellers joi

Table 13.1

Vegetation shifts in steppe pollen cores from the Don to the Irtysh

Site Razdorskoe, Lower Buzuluk Forest Northern Kazakhstan

Don (Kremenetski 1997) Pobochnoye peat Upper Tobol to Upper

bog Middle Volga Irtysh (Kremenetski

(Kremenetski et al. et al. 1997)

1999)

Type Stratified settlement
Pollen core

forest peat bog core two lake cores and
two peat bog cores

Dates 6500-3800 BCE 6000-3800 BCE

Flora Birch-pine forest on sandy Oak trees appear,

river terraces. On floodplain, join elm, hazel, black
elm and linden forest with alder forests around
hazelnut & black alder. Oak Pobochnoye lake,
and hornbeam present after 4800-3800 BCE lake
4300 BCE. gets shallower, Typha

reeds increase, forest
expands.

6500-3800 BCE
Birch-pine forest
evolving to open pine
forest in forest-steppe,
with willow near
waterways. In steppe,
Artemesia and
Chenopodia.

3800-3300 BCE
Slight reduction in
deciduous trees, increase in
Ephedra, hazel, lime,
and pine on floodplain.

3800-3300 BCE
Lake slowly converts
to sedge-moss swamp.
Typha reeds peak.
Pine and lime trees
peak. Probably
warmer.

3800-3300 BCE
Moist period, forests
expand. Lime trees
with oak, elm, and
black alder also
expand. Soils show
increased moisture.

Sub-Boreal 3300-2000 BCE 3300-2000 BCE 3300-2000 BCE

Very dry. Sharp forest decline. Reduction in overall Forest retreats,

Ceralia appears. Chenopodia forest. In forest, pine broadleaf declines,

sharp rise. Maximum aridity down, birch up. Mokhove bog on the

2800-2000 BCE. Artemesia, an arid Tobol dries up about

herb indicator, 2800 BCE. Steppe

increases sharply. Lake grows,
is covered by alder
shrubs by 2000 BCE.

jo2 Chapter ij

Wagon Dwellers joj

BCE.

of the Yamnaya horizon was the material expression of the spread of late
Proto-Indo-European across the Pontic-Caspian steppes . 1

The behavior that really set the Yamnaya people apart was living on
wheels. Their new economy took advantage of two kinds of mobility: wag-
ons for slow bulk transport (water, shelter, and food) and horseback riding
for rapid light transport (scouting for pastures, herding, trading and raid-
ing expeditions). Together they greatly increased the potential scale of
herding economies. Herders operating out of a wagon could stay with their
herds out in the deep steppes, protected by mobile homes that carried

tents, water, and food. A diet of meat, milk, yogurt, cheese, and soups
made of wild Chenopodium seeds and wild greens can be deduced, with a
little imagination, from the archaeological evidence. The reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European vocabulary tells us that honey and honey-based
mead also were consumed, probably on special occasions. Larger herds
meant greater disparities in herd wealth, which is reflected in disparities
in the wealth of Yamanaya graves. Mobile wagon camps are almost im-
possible to find archaeologically, so settlements became archaeologically
invisible where the new economy took hold.

The Yamnaya horizon is the visible archaeological expression of a social
adjustment to high mobility — the invention of the political infrastructure
to manage larger herds from mobile homes based in the steppes. A lin-
guistic echo of the same event might be preserved in the similarity
between English guest and host. They are cognates, derived from one
Proto-Indo-European root ( *ghos-ti -). (A “ghost” in English was originally
a visitor or guest.) The two social roles opposed in English guest and host
were originally two reciprocal aspects of the same relationship. The late
Proto-Indo-European guest-host relationship required that “hospitality”
(from the same root through Latin hospes ‘foreigner, guest') and “friend-
ship” (*keiwos-) should be extended by hosts to guests (both *ghos-ti-)> in
the knowledge that the receiver and giver of “hospitality” could later re-
verse roles. The social meaning of these words was then more demanding
than modern customs would suggest. The guest-host relationship was
bound by oaths and sacrifices so serious that Homer's warriors, Glaukos
and Diomedes, stopped fighting and presented gifts to each other when
they learned that their grandfathers had shared a guest-host relationship.
This mutual obligation to provide “hospitality” functioned as a bridge be-
tween social units (tribes, clans) that had ordinarily restricted these obli-
gations to their kin or co-residents (?h /ros-). Guest-host relationships
would have been very useful in a mobile herding economy, as a way of sepa-
rating people who were moving through your territory with your assent
from those who were unwelcome, unregulated, and therefore unprotected.
The guest-host institution might have been among the critical identity-
defining innovations that spread with the Yamnaya horizon . 2

It is difficult to document a shift to a more mobile residence pattern five
thousand years after the fact, but a few clues survive. Increased mobility
can be detected in a pattern of brief, episodic use, abandonment, and,
much later, re-use at many Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries; the absence of
degraded or overgrazed soils under early Yamnaya kurgans; and the first
appearance of kurgan cemeteries in the deep steppe, on the dry plateaus

J04 Chapter ij

between major river valleys. The principal indicator of increased mobility
is a negative piece of evidence: the archaeological disappearance of long-
term settlements east of the Don River. Yamnaya settlements are known
west of the Don in Ukraine, but east of the Don in Russia there are no
significant Yamnaya settlements in a huge territory extending to the Ural
River containing many hundreds of excavated Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries
and probably thousands of excavated Yamnaya graves (I have never seen a
full count). The best explanation for the complete absence of settlements is
that the eastern Yamnaya people spent much of their lives in wagons.

The Yamnaya horizon was the first more or less unified ritual, economic,
and material culture to spread across the entire Pontic-Caspian steppe re-
gion, but it was never completely homogeneous even materially. At the
beginning it already contained two major variants, on the lower Don and
lower Volga, and, as it expanded, it developed other regional variants,
which is why most archaeologists are reluctant to call it the Yamnaya
“culture.” But many broadly similar customs were shared. In addition to
kurgan graves, wagons, and an increased emphasis on pastoralism, ar-
chaeological traits that defined the early Yamnaya horizon included shell-
tempered, egg-shaped pots with everted rims, decorated with comb stamps
and cord impressions; tanged bronze daggers; cast flat axes; bone pins of
various types; the supine-with-raised-knees burial posture; ochre staining
on grave floors near the feet, hips, and head; northeastern to eastern body
orientation (usually); and the sacrifice at funerals of wagons, carts, sheep,
cattle, and horses. The funeral ritual probably was connected with a cult
of ancestors requiring specific rituals and prayers, a connection between
language and cult that introduced late Proto-Indo-European to new
speakers.

The most obvious material division within the early Yamnaya horizon
was between east and west. The eastern (Volga-Ural-North Caucasian
steppe) Yamnaya pastoral economy was more mobile than the western one
(South Bug— lower Don). This contrast corresponds in an intriguing way to
economic and cultural differences between eastern and western Indo-
European language branches. For example, impressions of cultivated grain
have been found in western Yamnaya pottery, in both settlements and
graves, and Proto-Indo-European cognates related to cereal agriculture
were well preserved in western Indo-European vocabularies. But grain
imprints are absent in eastern Yamnaya pots, just as many of the cognates
related to agriculture are missing from the eastern Indo-European lan-
guages. 3 Western Indo-European vocabularies contained a few roots that
were borrowed from Afro-Asiatic languages, such as the word for the

Wagon Dwellers joj

domesticated bull, *tawr - , and the western Yamnaya groups lived next to
the Tripolye culture, which might have spoken a language distantly de-
rived from an Afro-Asiatic language of Anatolia. Eastern Indo-European
generally lacked these borrowed Afro-Asiatic roots. Western Indo-
European religious and ritual practices were female-inclusive, and western
Yamnaya people shared a border with the female-figurine-making Tri-
polye culture: eastern Indo-European rituals and gods, however, were
more male-centered, and eastern Yamnaya people shared borders with
northern and eastern foragers who did not make female figurines. In west-
ern Indo-European branches the spirit of the domestic hearth was female
(Hestia, the Vestal Virgins), and in Indo-Iranian it was male (Agni).
Western Indo-European mythologies included strong female deities such
as Queen Magb and the Valkyries, whereas in Indo-Iranian the furies of
war were male Maruts. Eastern Yamnaya graves on the Volga contained a
higher percentage (80%) of males than any other Yamnaya region. Perhaps
this east-west tension in attitudes toward gender contributed to the sepa-
ration of the feminine gender as a newly marked grammatical category in
the dialects of the Volga-Ural region, one of the innovations that defined
Proto-Indo-European grammar. 4

Did the Yamnaya horizon spread into neighboring regions in a way that
matches the known relationships and sequencing between the Indo-
European branches? This also is a difficult subject to follow archaeologi-
cally, but the movements of the Yamnaya people match what we would
expect surprisingly well. First, just before the Yamnaya horizon appeared,
the Repin culture of the Volga-Ural region threw off a subgroup that mi-
grated across the Kazakh steppes about 3700-3500 BCE and established
itself in the western Altai, where it became the Afanasievo culture. The
separation of the Afanasievo culture from Repin probably represented the
separation of Pre-Tocharian from classic Proto-Indo-European. Second,
some three to five centuries later, about 3300 BCE, the rapid diffusion of
the early Yamnaya horizon across the Pontic-Caspian steppes scattered
the speakers of late Proto-Indo-European dialects and sowed the seeds
of regional differentiation. After a pause of only a century or two, about
3100-3000 BCE, a large migration stream erupted from within the west-
ern Yamnaya region and flowed up the Danube valley and into the Car-
pathian Basin during the Early Bronze Age. Literally thousands of
kurgans can be assigned to this event, which could reasonably have incu-
bated the ancestral dialects for several western Indo-European language
branches, including Pre-Italic and Pre-Celtic. After this movement slowed
or stopped, about 2800-2600 BCE, late Yamnaya people came face to face

jo6 Chapter rj

with people who made Corded Ware tumulus cemeteries in the east Car-
pathian foothills, a historic meeting through which dialects ancestral to
the northern Indo-European languages (Germanic, Slavic, Baltic) began
to spread among eastern Corded Ware groups. Finally, at the end of the
Middle Bronze Age, about 2200-2000 BCE, a migration stream flowed
from the late Yamnaya/Poltavka cultures of the Middle Volga-Ural region
eastward around the southern Urals, creating the Sintashta culture, which
almost certainly represented the ancestral Indo-Iranian-speaking com-
munity. These migrations are described in chapters 14 and 15.

The Yamnaya horizon meets the expectations for late Proto-Indo-
European in many ways: chronologically (the right time), geographically
(the right place), materially (wagons, horses, animal sacrifices, tribal
pastoralism), and linguistically (bounded by persistent frontiers); and it
generated migrations in the expected directions and in the expected
sequence. Early Proto-Indo-European probably developed between
4000 and 3500 BCE in the Don-Volga-Ural region. Late Proto-Indo-
European, with o-stems and the full wagon vocabulary, expanded rapidly
across the Pontic-Caspian steppes with the appearance of the Yamnaya
horizon beginning about 3300 BCE. By 2500 BCE the Yamnaya horizon
had fragmented into daughter groups, beginning with the appearance of
the Catacomb culture in the Don-Kuban region and the Poltavka culture
in the Volga-Ural region about 2800 BCE. Late Proto-Indo-European
also was so diversified by 2500 BCE that it probably no longer existed
(chapter 3). Again, the linkage with the steppe archaeological evidence is
compelling.

Why Not a Kurgan Culture?

Marija Gimbutas first articulated her concept of a “Kurgan culture” as the
archaeological expression of the Proto-Indo-European language commu-
nity in 1956. 5 The Kurgan culture combined two cultures first defined by
V. A. Gorodtsov, who, in 1901, excavated 107 kurgans in the Don River
valley. He divided his discoveries into three chronological groups. The
oldest graves, stratified deepest in the oldest kurgans, were the Pit-graves
(Yamnaya). They were followed by the Catacomb-graves (Katakombnaya),
and above them were the timber-graves (Srubnaya). Gorodtsov s sequence
still defines the Early (EBA), Middle (MBA), and Late Bronze Age
(LBA) grave types of the western steppes. 6 Gimbutas combined the first
two (EBA Pit-graves and MBA Catacomb-graves) into the Kurgan cul-
ture. But later she also began to include many other Late Neolithic and

Wagon Dwellers joy

Bronze Age cultures of Europe, including the Maikop culture and many
of the Late Neolithic cultures of eastern Europe, as outgrowths or cre-
ations of Kurgan culture migrations. The Kurgan culture was so broadly
defined that almost any culture with burial mounds, or even (like the
Baden culture) without them could be included. Here we are discussing
the steppe cultures of the Russian and Ukrainian EBA, just one part of
the original core of Gimbutass Kurgan culture concept. Russian and
Ukrainian archaeologists do not generally use the term “Kurgan culture”;
rather than lumping EBA Yamnaya and MBA Catacomb-graves together
they tend to divide both groups and their associated time periods into ever
finer slices. I will seek a middle ground.

The Yamnaya horizon is usually described by Slavic archaeologists not
as a “culture” but as a “cultural-historical community.” This phrase carries
the implication that there was a thread of cultural identity or shared eth-
nic origin running through the Yamnaya social world, although one that
diversified and evolved with the passage of time/ Although I agree that
this probably was true in this case, I will use the Western term “horizon ”
which is neutral about cultural identity, in order to avoid using a term
loaded toward that interpretation. As I explained in chapter 7, a horizon
in archaeology is a style or fashion in material culture that is rapidly ac-
cepted by and superimposed on local cultures across a wide area. In this
case, the five Pontic-Caspian cultures of the Final Eneolithic (chapter 12)
were the local cultures that rapidly accepted, in varying degrees, the Yam-
naya lifestyle.

Beyond the Eastern Frontier:

The Afanasievo Migration to the Altai

In the last chapter I introduced the subject of the trans-continental, Repin-
culture migration that created the Afanasievo culture in the western Altai
Mountains and probably detached the Tocharian branch from common
Proto-Indo-European. I describe it here because the process of migration
and return migration that installed the early Afanasievo culture continued
across the north Kazakh steppes during the Yamnaya period. In fact, it is
usually discussed as an event connected with the Yamnaya horizon; it is only
recently that early Afanasievo radiocarbon dates, and the broadening under-
standing of the age and geographic extent of the Repin culture, have pushed
the beginning of the movement back into the pre-Yamnaya Repin period.

Two or three centuries before the Yamnaya horizon first appeared, the
Repin-type communities of the middle Volga-Ural steppes experienced a

Figure 13.2 Culture areas in the steppes between the Volga and the Altai at
the time of the Afanasievo migration, 3700-3300 BCE.

conflict that prompted some groups to move across the Ural River eastward
into the Kazakh steppes (figure 13.2). I say a conflict because of the ex-
traordinary distance the migrants eventually put between themselves and
their relatives at home, implying a strongly negative push. On the other
hand, connections with the Volga-Ural Repin-Yamnaya world were main-
tained by a continuing round of migrations moving in both directions, so
some aspect of the destination must also have exerted a positive pull. It is
remarkable that the intervening north Kazakh steppe was not settled, or at
least that almost no kurgan cemeteries were constructed there. Instead, the
indigenous horse-riding Botai-Tersek culture emerged in the north Ka-
zakh steppe at just the time when the Repin-Afanasievo migration began.

The specific ecological target in this series of movements might have
been the islands of pine forest that occur sporadically in the northern Ka-
zakh steppes from the Tobol River in the west to the Altai Mountains in
the east. I am not sure why these pine islands would have been targeted
other than for the fuel and shelter they offered, but they do seem to cor-
respond with the few site locations linked to Afanasievo in the steppes,
and the same peculiar steppe-pine-forest islands occur also in the high
mountain valleys of the western Altai where early Afanasievo sites ap-
peared. 8 In the western Altai Mountains broad meadows and mountain

Wagon Dwellers jog

steppes dip both westward toward the Irtysh River of western Siberia
(probably the route of the first approach) and northward toward the Ob
and Yenisei rivers (the later spread). The Afanasievo culture appeared in
this beautiful setting, ideal for upland pastoralism, probably around 3700-
3400 BCE, during the Repin-late Khvalynsk period. 9 It flourished there
until about 2400 BCE, through the Yamnaya period in the Pontic-Caspian
steppes.

The Altai Mountains were about 2000 km east of the Ural River frontier
that defined the eastern edge of the early Proto-Indo-European world.
Only three kurgan cemeteries old enough to be connected with the Afa-
nasievo migrations have been found in the intervening 2000 km of steppes.
All three are classified as Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries, although the pot-
tery in some of the graves has Repin traits. Two were on the Tobol, not far
east of the Ural River, at Ubagan I and Verkhnaya Alabuga, possibly an
initial stopping place. The other, the Karagash kurgan cemetery, was
found 1000 km east of the Tobol, southeast of Karaganda in central Ka-
zakhstan. Karagash was on the elevated green slopes of an isolated moun-
tain spur that rose prominently above the horizon, a very visible landmark
near Karkaralinsk. The earthen mound of kurgan 2 at Karagash was 27 m
in diameter. It covered a stone cromlech circle 23 m in diameter, made of
oblong stones 1 m in length, projecting about 60-70 cm above the ground.
Some stones had traces of paint on them. A pot was broken inside the
southwestern edge of the cromlech on the original ground surface, before
the mound was built. The kurgan contained three graves in stone-lined
cists; the central grave and another under the southeastern part of the
kurgan were later robbed. The lone intact grave was found under the north-
eastern part of the kurgan. In it were sherds from a shell-tempered pot, a
fragment of a wooden bowl with a copper-covered lip, a tanged copper
dagger, a copper four-sided awl, and a stone pestle. The skeleton was of a
male forty to fifty years old laid on his back with his knees raised, oriented
southwest, with pieces of black charcoal and red ochre on the grave floor.
The metal artifacts were typical for the Yamnaya horizon; the stone crom-
lech, stone-lined cist, and pot were similar to Afansievo types. Directly
east of Karagash and 900 km away, up the Bukhtarta River valley east of
the Irtysh, were the peaks of the western Altai and the Ukok plateau,
where the first Afanasievo graves appeared. The Karagash kurgan is un-
likely to be a grave of the first migrants — it looks like a Yamnaya-Afanasievo
kurgan built by later people still participating in a cross-Kazakhstan circu-
lation of movements — but it probably does mark the initial route, since
routes in long-distance migrations tend to be targeted and re-used. 10

jio Chapter ij

Afanasievo

Karakol Kurgan 2, grave 1

50cm

Figure 13.3 Karakol kurgan 2, grave 1, an early Afanasievo grave in the west-
ern Gorny Altai. After Kubarev 1988.

The early Afanasievo culture in the Altai introduced fully developed kur-
gan funeral rituals and Repin-Yamnaya material culture. At Karakol, kur-
gan 2 in the Gorny Altai, an early Afanasievo grave (gr. 1) contained a small
pot similar to pots from the Ural River that are assigned to the Repin vari-
ant of early Yamnaya (figure 13.3). 11 Grave 1 was placed under a low kurgan
in the center of a stone cromlech 20 m in diameter. Afanasievo kurgans al-
ways were marked by a ring of stones, and large stone slabs were used to
cover grave pits (early) or to make stone-lined grave cists (late). Early Afa-
nasievo skull types resembled those of Yamnaya and western populations.
On the Ukok plateau, where the early Afanasievo cemetery at Bertek 33 was
found, the Afanasievo immigrants occupied a virgin landscape — there were
no earlier Mesolithic or Neolithic sites. Afanasievo sites also contained the
earliest bones of domesticated cattle, sheep, and horses in the Altai. At the
Afanasievo settlement of Balyktyul, domesticated sheep-goat were 61% of
the bones, cattle were 12%, and horses 8%. 12

Cemeteries of the local Kuznetsk-Altai foragers like Lebedi II were
located in the forest and forest-meadow zone higher up on the slopes of
the Altai, and contained a distinct set of ornaments (bear-teeth necklaces

Wagon Dwellers jii

and bone carvings of elk and bear), lithics (asymmetrical curved flint
knives), antler tools (harpoons), pottery (related to the Serovo-Glazkovo
pottery tradition of the Baikal forager tradition), and funeral rituals (no
kurgans, no stone slab over the grave). As time passed, Glazkovo forager
sites located to the northeast began to show the influence of Afanasievo
motifs on their ceramics, and metal objects began to appear in Glazkovo
sites. 13

It is clear that populations continued to circulate between the Ural
frontier and the Altai well into the Yamnaya period in the Ural steppes,
or after 3300 BCE, bringing many Yamnaya traits and practices to the
Altai. About a hundred metal objects have been found in Afanasievo
cemeteries in the Altai and Western Sayan Mountains, including three
sleeved copper axes of a classic Volga-Ural Yamnaya type, a cast shaft-
hole copper hammer-axe, and two tanged copper daggers of typical Yam-
naya type. These artifacts are recognized by Chernykh as western types
typical of Volga-Ural Yamnaya, with no native local precedents in the
Altai region. 14

Mallory and Mair have argued at book length that the Afanasievo
migration detached the Tocharian branch from Proto-Indo-European. A
material bridge between the Afanasievo culture and the Tarim Basin
Tocharians could be represented by the long-known but recently famous
Late Bronze Age Europoid “mummies” (not intentionally mummified but
naturally freeze-dried) found in the northern Taklamakan Desert, the
oldest of which are dated 1800-1200 BCE. In addition to the funeral
ritual (on the back with raised knees, in ledged and roofed grave pits),
there was a symbolic connection. On the stone walls of Late Afanasievo
graves in the Altai (perhaps dated about 2500 BC) archaeologist V. D.
Kubarev found paintings with “solar signs” and headdresses like the one
painted on the cheek of one of the Tarim “mummies” found at Zaghunluq,
dated about 1200 BCE. If Mallory and Mair were right, as seems likely,
late Afanasievo pastoralists were among the first to take their herds from
the Altai southward into the Tien Shan; and after 2000 BCE their de-
scendants crossed the Tien Shan into the northern oases of the Tarim
Basin. 15

Wagon Graves in the Steppes

We cannot say exactly when wagons first rolled into the Eurasian steppes.
But an image of a wagon on a clay cup is securely dated to 3500-3300
BCE at Bronocice in southern Poland (chapter 4). The ceramic wagon

ji2 Chapter ij

models of the Baden culture in Hungary and the Novosvobodnaya wagon
grave at Starokorsunskaya kurgan 2 on the Kuban River in the North
Caucasus probably are about the same age. The oldest excavated wagon
graves in the steppes are radiocarbon dated about 3100-3000 BCE, but it
is unlikely that they actually were the first. Wagons probably appeared in
the Pontic-Caspian steppes a couple of centuries before the Yamnaya ho-
rizon began. It would have taken some time for a new, wagon-dependent
herding system to get organized and begin to succeed. The spread of the
Yamnaya horizon was the signature of that success.

In a book published in 2000 Aleksandr Gei counted 257 Yamnaya and
Catacomb-culture wagon and cart burials in the Pontic-Caspian steppes,
dated by radiocarbon between about 3100 and 2200 BCE (see figures 4.4,
4.5, 4.6). Parts of wagons and carts were deposited in less than 5% of ex-
cavated Yamnaya-Catacomb graves, and the few graves that had them
were concentrated in particular regions. The largest cluster of wagon-
graves (120) was in the Kuban steppes north of the North Caucasus, not
far from Maikop. Most of the Kuban wagons (115) were in graves of the
Novotitorovskaya type, a local Kuban-region EBA culture that developed
from early Yamnaya. 16

Usually the vehicles used in funeral rituals were disassembled and the
wheels were placed near the corners of the grave pit, as if the grave itself
represented the wagon. But a whole wagon was buried west of the Dnieper
in the Yamnaya grave at Lukyanova kurgan, grave 1; and whole wagons
were found under nine Novotitorovskaya kurgans in the Kuban steppes.
Many construction details can be reconstructed from these ten cases. All
ten wagons had a fixed axle and revolving wheels. The wheels were made
of two or three planks doweled together and cut in a circular shape about
50-80 cm in diameter. The wagon bed was about 1 m wide and 2-2.5 m
long, and the gauge or track width between the wheels was 1.5-1.65 m.
The Novotitorovskaya wagon at Lebedi kurgan 2, grave 116, is recon-
structed by Gei with a box seat for the driver, supported on a cage of verti-
cal struts doweled into a rectangular frame. Behind the driver was the
interior of the wagon, the floor of which was braced with X-crossed planks
(like the repousse image on the Novosvobodnaya bronze cauldron from
the Evdik kurgan) (see figure 4.3a). The Lukyanovka wagon frame also
was braced with X-crossed planks. The passengers and cargo were pro-
tected under a “tilt,” a wagon cover made of reed mats painted with red,
white, and black stripes and curved designs, possibly sewn to a backing of
felt. Similar painted reed mats with some kind of organic backing were
placed on the floors of Yamnaya graves (figure 13. 4). 17

Wagon Dwellers jij

SEMENOVSKII

Figure 13.4 Painted reed mats in graves of the Yamnaya and related tradi-
tions. Top: Semenovskii kurgan 8, grave 9, late Yamnaya, lower Dniester
steppes; bottom, Ostanni kurgan 2, double grave 15 with two wagons, No-
votitorovskaya culture, Kuban River steppes. After Subbotin 1985, figure 7.7;
and Gei 2000.

314 Chapter i3

Table 13.3

Selected Radiocarbon Dates associated with the Afanasievo Migration and the Yamnava
Horizon y

Lahnnumher BP date Sample Calibrated date

1 . Afanasievo culture, Altai Mountains (from Parzinger 2002, Figure 10)
Unidentified sites

Bln4764 4409 170 ? 3310-2910 BCE

Bln 4765 4259136 ? 2920-2780 BCE

Bln 4767 4253 1 36 ? 2920-3780 BCE

Bln4766 4205 1 44 ? 2890-2690 BCE

Bln4769 4022+40 ? 2580-2470 BCE

Bln4919 3936+35 ? O/iQA

BP date

Kara-Koba I enclosure 3

Elo-bashi enclosure 5

4409 1 70
4259 1 36
4253136
4205 1 44
4022 + 40
3936135

5100 + 50

4920150

3310-2910 BCE
2920-2780 BCE
2920-3780 BCE
2890-2690 BCE
2580-2470 BCE
2490-2340 BCE

3970-3800 BCE

3760-3640 BCE

2. Yamnaya horizon kurgan cemeteries with multiple kurgans built together and
long gaps between construction phases

A. Yamnaya horizon cemeteries in Ukraine (from Telegin et al. 2003)

Avgustnivka cemetery

Phase 1 Ki2118

4800+55

kl/gr2

3650-3520 BCE

Phase 2 Ki7110

4130155

k 5/gr2

2870-2590 BCE

Ki7111

4190+60

k 4/gr2

2890-2670 BCE

Ki7116

4120160

k 4/grl

2870-2570 BCE

Verkhnetarasovka cemetery
Phase 1 Ki602 4070 + 120

k 9/18

2870-2460 BCE

Ki957

4090195

k 70/13

2870-2490 BCE

Phase 2 Ki581

38201190

k 17/3

2600-1950 BCE

KJ582

37401150

k 21/11

2400-1940 BCE

Vinogradnoe cemetery

Phase 1 KJ9414

4340 1 70

k 3/10

3090-2880 BCE

Phase 2 Ki9402

39701 70

k 3/25

2580-2340 BCE

KJ987

3950180

k 2/11

2580-2300 BCE

Ki9413

3930170

k 24/37

2560-2300 BCE

Wagon Dwellers j/j

Table 13.3 {continued)

lab number

BP date

Sample

Calibrated date

Golovkovka cemetery
Phase 1 Ki6722

3980160

k 7/4

2580-2350 BCE

Ki6719

3970+55

k 6/8

2580-2350 BCE

Ki6730

3960+60

k 5/3

2570-2350 BCE

Ki6724

3950150

k 12/3

2560-2340 BCE

Ki6729

3920150

k 14/9

2560-2340 BCE

Ki6727

3910115

k 14/2

2460-2350 BCE

Ki6728

3905155

k 14/7

2470-2300 BCE

Ki6721

3850155

k 6/11

2460-2200 BCE

Ki2726

3840150

k 4/4

2400-2200 BCE

Dobrovody cemetery
Phase 1 K12129

4160155

k2/4

2880-2630 BCE

Phase 2 Ki2107

3980145

k2/6

2580-2450 BCE

Ki7090

3960160

k 1/6

2570-2350 BCE

Minovka cemetery
Phase 1 Ki8296

4030170

k2/5

2840-2460 BCE

Ki 421

3970+80

k 1/3

2620-2340 BCE

Novoseltsy cemetery
Phase 1 Kil219

4520170

k 19/7

3360-3100 BCE

Phase 2 Kil712

4350170

k 19/15

3090-2880 BCE

Phase 3 Ki7127

4055165

k 19/19

2840-2470 BCE

Ki7128

4005150

k20/8

2580-2460 BCE

Otradnoe cemetery
Phase 1 Ki478

39901100

k26/9

2850-2300 BCE

Phase 2 Ki 431

38901105

k 1/17

2550-2200 BCE

Ki 470

3860+105

k24/l

2470-2140 BCE

Ki452

38301120

k 1/21

2470-2070 BCE

Pereshchepyno cemetery
Phase 1 Ki9980

4150170

k 4/13

2880-2620 BCE

Ki9982

4105170

k 1/7

2870-2500 BCE

Ki9981

4080170

k 1/6

2860-2490 BCE

Svatove cemetery
Phase 1 Ki585

40001190

k 1/1

2900-2200 BCE

Ki586

40101180

k 2/1

2900-2250 BCE

ji6 Chapter ij

Table 13.3 (continued)

Lab number

BP date

Sample

Calibrated date

Talyanki cemetery
Phase 1 Ki6714

3990 ±50

k 1/1

2580-2460 BCE

Ki6716

3950 ±50

k 1/3

2560-2340 BCE

Phase 2 Ki2612

3760 ±70

k2/3

2290-2030 BCE

B. Yamnaya horizon cemeteries in the middle Volga region (Samara Valley Project)

Nizhnaya Orlyanka 1
Phase 1 AA1257

4520 ±75

k4/2

3360-3090 BCE

OxA**

4510±75

k 1/15

3360-3090 BCE

Grachevka II
Phase 1 AA53805

4342 ±56

k 5/2

3020-2890 BCE

AA53807

4361 ±65

k 7/1

3090-2890 BCE

C. Poltavka cemetery in

the middle Volga region, three kurgans built

in a single phase.

Krasnosamarskoe IV cemetery

AA37034

4306 ±53

kurgan 1, grave 4

2929-2877 BCE

AA37031

4284 ±79

kurgan 1, grave 1

3027-2700 BCE

AA37033

4241 ±70

kurgan 1, grave 3 central

2913-2697 BCE

AA37036

4327 ±59

kurgan 2, grave 2 central

3031-2883 BCE

AA37041

4236 ±47

kurgan 3, grave 9 central

2906-2700 BCE

AA37040

4239 ±49

kurgan 3, grave 8

2910-2701 BCE

The Yamnaya- Poltavka dates show that multiple kurgans were constructed almost simultane-
ously with long gaps of time between episodes, perhaps indicating episodic use of the associated
pastures.

The oldest radiocarbon dates from steppe vehicle graves bracket a cen-
tury or two around 3000 BCE (table 13.3). One came from Ostannii
kurgan 1, grave 160 in the Kuban, a grave of the third phase of the No-
votitorovskaya culture dated 4440±40 BP, or 3320-2930 BCE. The other
is from Bal’ki kurgan, grave 57, on the lower Dnieper, an early Yamnaya
grave dated 4370 ±120 BP, or 3330-2880 BCE (see figures 4.4, 4.5). The
probability distributions for both dates lie predominantly before 3000
BCE, which is why I use the figure 3100 BCE. But almost certainly these
were not the first wagons in the steppes. 18

Wagon Dwellers jiy

Wagons probably appeared in the steppes between about 3500 and
3300 BCE, possibly from the west through Europe, or possibly through
the late Maikop-Novosvobodnaya culture, from Mesopotamia. Since we
cannot really say where the wheel-and-axle principle was invented, we do
not know from which direction it first entered the steppes. But it had the
greatest effect in the Don-Volga-Ural steppes, the eastern part of the early
Proto-Indo-European world, and the Yamnaya horizon had its oldest
roots there.

The subsequent spread of the Yamnaya horizon across the Pontic-
Caspian steppes probably did not happen primarily through warfare, for
which there is only minimal evidence. Rather, it spread because those who
shared the agreements and institutions that made high mobility possible
became potential allies, and those who did not share these institutions
were separated as Others. Larger herds also probably brought increased
prestige and economic power, because large herd-owners had more ani-
mals to loan or offer as sacrifices at public feasts. Larger herds translated
into richer bride-prices for the daughters of big herd owners, which would
have intensified social competition between them. A similar competitive
dynamic was partly responsible for the Nuer expansion in east Africa
(chapter 6). The Don-Volga dialect associated with the biggest and there-
fore most mobile herd owners probably was late Proto-Indo-European.

Where Did the Yamnaya Horizon Begin?

Why, as I just stated, did the Yamnaya horizon have its oldest roots in the
eastern part of the Proto-Indo-European world? The artifact styles and
funeral rituals that defined the early Yamnaya horizon appeared earliest in
the east. Most archaeologists accept Nikolai Merpert’s judgment that the
oldest Yamnaya variants appeared in the Volga-Don steppes, the driest
and easternmost part of the Pontic-Caspian steppe zone.

The Yamnaya horizon was divided into nine regional groups in Merpert’s
classic 1974 study. His regions have been chopped into finer and finer
pieces by younger scholars. 14 These regional groups, however defined, did
not pass through the same chronological stages at the same time. The pot-
tery of the earliest Yamnaya phase (A) is divided by Telegin into two vari-
ants, A1 and A2 (figure 13.5). 20 Type A1 pots had a longer collar, decoration
was mainly in horizontal panels on the upper third of the vessel, and pearl
protrusions often appeared on and beneath the collar. Type A1 was like
Repin pottery from the Don. Type A2 pots had decorations all ovei the
vessel body, often in vertical panels, and had shorter, thicker, more everted

Ji8 Chapter ij

Figure 13.5 Early Yamnaya ceramic types Al (Repin-
related) and A 2 (Khvalynsk-related). After Telegin
et al. 2003.

rims. Type A2 was like late Khvalynsk pottery from the lower Volga. Re-
pin vessels were made by coiling strips of clay; Type A2 Yamnaya vessels
were usually made by pounding strips of clay into bag-shaped depressions
or moulds to build up the walls, a very specific technological style. Pots of
both subtypes were made of clays mixed with shell. Some of the' shell tem-
per seems to have been intentionally added, and some, particularly in Type
A2 vessels, came from lake-bottom clays that naturally contained bits of
shell and lake snails. Both the Al and A2 types appeared across the
Pontic-Caspian steppes in the earliest Yamnaya graves.

Wagon Dwellers jig

Early Yamnaya on the Lower Volga and Lower Don

Archaeological surveys led by I. V. Sinitsyn on the lower Volga between
1951 and 1953 revealed a regular series of Bronze Age kurgan cemeteries
spaced 15-20 km apart along the level plains on the eastern bank between
Saratov and Volgograd (then Stalingrad). Some of these kurgans con-
tained stratified sequences of graves, and this stratigraphic evidence was
employed to identify the earliest Yamnaya monuments. Important strati-
fied kurgans included Bykovo cemetery II, kurgan 2, grave 1 (with a pot of
Telegins Type Al stratified beneath later Yamnaya graves) and Berezh-
novka cemetery I, kurgans 5 and 32, graves 22 and 2, respectively (with
pots ofTelegins Type A 2 stratified beneath later graves). In 1956 Gimbu-
tas suggested that the “Kurgan Culture” began on the lower Volga. Mer-
perts synthesis of the Yamnaya horizon in 1974 supported Gimbutas.
Recent excavations have reconfirmed the antiquity of Yamnaya traditions
on the lower Volga. Archaic antecedents of both the Al and A2 types of
early Yamnaya pottery have been found in settlements on the lower Volga
at Kyzyl Khak and Kara Khuduk (see figure 12.5), dated by radiocarbon
between 4000 and 3500 BCE. Graves that seem intermediate between
late Khvalynsk and Yamnaya in style and ritual have also been found at
Shlyakovskii kurgan, Engels and Tarlyk between Saratov and Volgograd
on the lower Volga.

The Al or Repin style was made earliest in the middle Don-middle
Volga region. Repin pottery is stratified beneath Yamnaya pottery at Cher-
kassky on the middle Don and is dated between 3950 and 3600 BCE at an
antelope hunters’ camp on the lower Volga at Kyzyl-Khak. The earliest
Repin pottery was somewhat similar in form and decoration to the late
Sredni Stog-Konstantinovka types on the lower Don, and it is now
thought that contact with the late Maikop-Novosvobodnaya culture on
the lower Don at places like Konstantinovka stimulated the emergence
and spread of the early Repin culture and, through Repin, early Yamnaya.
The metal-tanged daggers and sleeved axes of the early Yamnaya horizon
certainly were copied after Maikop-Novosvobodnaya types.

The A2 or Khvalynsk style began on the lower Volga among late Khval-
ynsk populations. This bag-shaped kind of pottery remained the most
common type in lower Volga Yamnaya graves, and later spread up the
Volga into the middle Volga-Ural steppes, where the A 2 style gradually
replaced Repin-style Yamnaya pottery. Again, contact with people from
the late Maikop-Novosvobodnaya culture, such as the makers of the kurgan

J20 Chapter ij

at Evdik on the lower Volga, might have stimulated the change from late
Khvalynsk to early Yamnaya. One of the stimuli introduced from the
North Caucasus might have been wagons and wagon-making skills. 21

Early Yamnaya on the Dnieper

The type site for early Yamnaya in Ukraine is a settlement, Mikhailovka.
That Mikhailovka is a settlement, not a kurgan cemetery, immediately
identifies the western Yamnaya way of life as more residentially stable
than that of eastern Yamnaya. The strategic hill fort at Mikhailovka (level
I) on the lower Dnieper was occupied before 3400 BCE by people who
had connections in the coastal steppes to the west (the Mikhailovka I cul-
ture). After 3400-3300 BCE Mikhailovka (level II) was occupied by
people who made pottery of the Repin-Al type, and therefore had con-
nections to the east. While Repin-style pottery had deep roots on the
middle Don, it was intrusive on the Dnieper, and quite different from the
pottery of Mikhailovka I. Mikhailovka II is itself divided into a lower
level and an upper level. Lower II was contemporary with late Tripolye Cl
and probably should be dated 3400-3300 BCE, whereas upper II was
contemporary with early Tripolye C2 and should be dated 3300-3000
BCE. Repin-style pottery was found in both levels. The Mikhailovka II
archaeological layer was about 60-70 cm thick. Houses included both
dug-outs and surface houses with one or two hearths, tamped clay floors,
partial stone wall foundations, and roofs of reed thatch, judging by thick
deposits of reed ashes on the floors. This settlement was occupied by peo-
ple who were newly allied to or intermarried with the Repin-style early
Yamnaya communities of the Volga-Don region.

The people of Mikhailovka II farmed much less than those of
Mikhailovka I. The frequency of cultivated grain imprints was 1 im-
print per 273 sherds at Mikhailovka I but declined to 1 in 604 sherds for
early Yamnaya Mikhailovka II, and 1 in 4,065 sherds for late Yamnaya
Mikhailovka III, fifteen times fewer than in Mikhailovka I. At the same
time food remains in the form of animal bones were forty-five times
greater in the Yamnaya levels than in Mikhailovka I. 22 So although the
total amount of food debris increased greatly during the Yamnaya period,
the contribution of grain to the diet decreased. Grain imprints did occur
in late Yamnaya funeral pottery from western Ukraine, as at Belyaevka
kurgan 1, grave 20 and Glubokoe kurgan 2, grave 8, kurgans on the lower
Dniester. These imprints included einkorn wheat, bread wheat ( Triticnm
aestivnm ), millet ( Panicum miliaceum ), and barley ( Hordeum vu/gare). Some

Wagon Dwellers 321

Yamnaya groups in the Dnieper-Dniester steppes occasionally cultivated
small plots of grain, as pastoralists have always done in the steppes. But
cultivation declined in importance at Mikhailovka even as the Yamnaya
settlement grew larger. 23

When Did the Yamnaya Horizon Begin?

Dimitri Telegin and his colleagues used 210 radiocarbon dates from
Yamnaya graves to establish the outlines of a general Yamnaya chronology.
The earliest time interval with a substantial number of Yamnaya graves is
about 3400-3200 BCE. Almost all the early dates are on wood taken
from graves, so they do not need to be corrected for old carbon reservoir
effects that can affect human bone. Graves dated in this interval can be
found across the Pontic-Caspian steppes: in the northwestern Pontic
steppes (Novoseltsy k. 19 gr. 7, Odessa region), the lower Dnieper steppes
(Obloy k. 1, gr. 7, Kherson region), the Donets steppes (Volonterivka k. 1,
gr. 4, Donetsk region), the lower Don steppes (Usman k. 1, gr. 13, Rostov
region), the middle Volga steppes (Nizhnaya Orlyanka I, k. 1, gr. 5 and k.
4, gr. 1), and the Kalmyk steppes south of the lower Volga (Zunda Tolga,
k. 1, gr. 15). Early Yamnaya must have spread rapidly across all the Pontic-
Caspian steppes between about 3400 and 3200 BCE. The rapidity of the
spread is interesting, suggesting both a competitive advantage and an ag-
gressive exploitation of it. Other local cultures survived in pockets tor
centuries, since radiocarbon dates from Usatovo sites on the Dniester, late
Post-Mariupol sites on the Dnieper and Kemi-Oba on the Crimean pen-
insula overlap with early Yamnaya radiocarbon dates between about 3300
and 2800 BCE. All three groups were replaced by late Yamnaya variants
after 2800 BCE. 24

Were the Yamnaya People Nomads?

Steppe nomads have fascinated and horrified agricultural civilizations
since the Scythians looted their way through Assyria in 627 BCE. We
still tend to stereotype all steppe nomads as people without towns, living
in tents or wagons hung with brilliant carpets, riding shaggy horses among
their cattle and sheep, and able to combine their fractious clans into vast
pitiless armies that poured out of the steppes at unpredictable intervals for
no apparent reason other than pillage. "Their peculiar kind of mobile pas-
toral economy, nomadic pastoralism, is often interpreted by historians as a
parasitic adaptation that depended on agriculturally based states. Nomads

J22 Chapter ij

needed states, according to this dependency hypothesis, for grain, metals,
and loot. They needed enormous amounts of food and weapons to feed and
arm their armies, and huge quantities of loot to maintain their loyalty, and
that volume of food and wealth could only be acquired from agricultural
states. Eurasian nomadic pastoralism has been interpreted as an opportu-
nistic response to the evolution of centralized states like China and Persia
on the borders of the steppe zone. Yamnaya pastoralism, whatever it was,
could not have been nomadic pastoralism, because it appeared before there
were any states for the Yamnaya people to depend on. 25

But the dependency model of Eurasian nomadic pastoralism really ex-
plains only the political and military organization of Iron Age and Medieval
nomads. The historian Nicola DiCosmo has shown that political and mili-
tary organizations among nomads were transformed by the evolution of
large standing armies that protected the leader— essentially a permanent
royal bodyguard that ballooned into an army, with all the costs that im-
plied. As for the economic basis of nomadic pastoralism, Sergei Vainshtein,
the Soviet ethnographer, and DiCosmo both recognized that many nomads
raised a little barley or millet, leaving a few people to tend small valley-
bottom fields during the summer migrations. Nomads also mined their
own metal ores, abundant in the Eurasian steppes, and made their own
metal tools and weapons in their own styles. The metal crafts and subsis-
tence economy that made Eurasian nomadic pastoralism possible did not
depend on imported metal or agricultural subsidies from neighboring farm-
ers. Centralized agricultural states like those of Uruk-period Mesopotamia
were very good at concentrating wealth, and if steppe pastoralists could si-
phon off part of that wealth it could radically transform tribal steppe mili-
tary and political structures, but the everyday subsistence economics of
nomadic pastoralism did not require outside support from states. 26

If nomadic pastoralism is an economic term, referring not to political
organization and military confederacies but simply to a form of pastoral
economy dependent on high residential mobility, it appeared during the
Yamnaya horizon. After the EBA Yamnaya period an increasingly bifur-
cated economy appeared, with both mobile and settled elements, in the
MBA Catacomb culture. This sedentarizing trend then intensified with
the appearance of permanent, year-round settlements across the northern
Eurasian steppes during the Late Bronze Age (LBA) with the Srubnaya
culture. Finally mobile pastoral nomadism of a new militaristic type ap-
peared in the Iron Age with the Scythians. But the Scythians did not in-
vent the first pastoral economy based on mobility. That seems to have been
the great innovation of the Yamnaya horizon.

Wagon Dwellers j 2 j

Yamnaya Herding Patterns

An important clue to how the Yamnaya herding system worked is the
location of Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries. Most Yamnaya kurgan cemeter-
ies across the Pontic-Caspian region were located in the major river val-
leys, often on the lowest river terrace overlooking riverine forests and
marshes. But at the beginning of the Yamnaya period kurgan cemeteries
also began to appear for the first time in the deep steppes, on the plateaus
between the major river valleys. If a cemetery can be interpreted as an
ancestral claim to property (“here are the graves of my ancestors”), then
the appearance of kurgan cemeteries in the deep steppes signaled that
deep-steppe pastures had shifted from wild and free to cultured and
owned resources. In 1985 V. Shilov made a count of the excavated kur-
gans located in the deep steppes, on inter-valley plateaus, in the steppe
region between the lower Don, the lower Volga, and the North Caucasus.
He counted 799 excavated graves in 316 kurgans located in the deep
steppes, outside major river valleys. The earliest graves, the first ones to
appear in these locations, were Yamnaya graves. Yamnaya accounted for
10% (78) of the graves, and 45% (359) were from MBA cultures related to
the Catacomb culture, 7% (58) were from the LBA Srubnaya culture,
29% (230) were of Scytho-Sarmatian origin, and 9% (71) were historical-
Medieval. The exploitation of pastures on the plateaus between the river
valleys began during the EBA and rapidly reached its all-time peak dur-
ing the MBA. 27

N. Shishlina collected seasonal botanical data from kurgan graves in the
Kalmyk steppes, north of the North Caucasus, part of the same region that
Shilov had studied. Shishlina found that Yamnaya people moved seasonally
between valley-bottom pastures (occupied during all seasons) and deep-
steppe plateau pastures (probably in the spring and summer) located within
15-50 km of the river valleys. Shishlina emphasized the localized nature of
these migratory cycles. Repetitive movements between the valleys and
plateau steppes created overgrazed areas with degraded soils (preserved
today under MBA kurgan mounds) by the end of the Yamnaya period.

What was the composition of Bronze Age herds in the Don-Volga
steppes? Because there are no Yamnaya settlements east of the Don, fau-
nal information has to be extracted from human graves. Of 2,096 kurgan
graves reviewed by Shilov in both the river valleys and the inter-valley
plateaus — a much bigger sample than just the graves on the plateaus —
just 15.2% of Yamnaya graves contained sacrifices of domesticated

3 2 4 Chapter ij

Table 13.2

Domesticated Animals in Early Bronze Age Graves and Settlements in the
Pontic-Caspian Steppes

Culture

Cattle

Sheep/gt

Horse

Pig

Dog

Don- Volga steppe, Yamnaya graves

15%

65%

8%

—

5%

Mikhailovka I I/I 1 1, Yamnaya
settlement

59%

29%

11%

9%

0.7%

Repin (lower Don), settlement

18%

9%

55%

9%

—

Note: Missing % were unidentifiable as to species.

animals. Most of these contained the bones of sheep or goats (65%), with
cattle a distant second (15%), horses third (8%) and dogs fourth (5%)
(table 13.2). 28

Yamnaya herding patterns were different in the west, between the
Dnieper and Don valleys. One difference was the presence of Yamnaya
settlements, implying a less mobile, more settled herding pattern. At
Mikhailovka levels II and III, which define early and late Yamnaya in the
Dnieper valley, cattle (60%) were more numerous than sheep (29%), un-
like the sheep-dominant herds of the east. Kurgan cemeteries penetrated
only a few kilometers into the plateaus; most cemeteries were located in
the Dnieper valley or its larger tributaries. This riverine cattle-herding
economy was tethered to fortified strongholds like Mikhailovka, sup-
ported by occasional small grain fields. About a dozen small Yamnaya
settlements have been excavated in the Dnieper-Don steppes at places
such as Liventsovka and Samsonovka on the lower Don. Most occupy less
than 1 ha and were relatively low-intensity occupations, although fortifi-
cation ditches protected Samsonovka and Mikhailovka, and a stone forti-
fication wall was excavated at Skelya-Kamenolomnya. Cattle are said to
predominate in the animal bones from all these places. 29

East of Repin no Yamnaya settlements have been found. Occasional
wind-eroded scatters of microliths and Yamnaya pottery sherds have been
observed in valley bottoms and near lakes in the Manych and North Cas-
pian desert-steppes and deserts, but without intact cultural layers. In the
lusher grasslands where it is more difficult to see small surface sites, even
Yamnaya surface scatters are almost unknown. For example, the Samara

Wagon Dwellers J25

oblast on the middle Volga was dotted with known settlements of the
Mesolithic, Neolithic, Eneolithic, and Late Bronze Ages, but it had no
EBA Yamnaya settlements. In 1996, during the Samara Valley Project,
we attempted to find ephemeral Bronze Age camps by digging test pits at
twelve favorable-looking places along the bottom of a stream valley, Pe-
schanyi Dol, that had four Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries clustered near its
mouth around the village of Utyevka (see figure 16.11 for a map). The
Peschanyi Dol valley is today used as a summer pasturing place for cattle
herds from three nearby Russian rural villages. We discovered seven
ephemeral LBA Srubnaya ceramic scatters in this pleasant valley and a
larger Srubnaya settlement, Barinovka, at its mouth. The LBA settlement
and one camp also had been occupied during the MBA; each yielded a
small handful of MBA ceramic sherds. But we found no EBA sherds — no
Yamnaya settlements.

If we cannot find the camps that Yamnaya herders occupied through the
winter, when they had to retreat with their herds to the protection of riv-
erine forests and marshes (where most Yamnaya cemeteries were located),
then their herds were so large that they had to keep moving even in win-
ter. In a similar northern grassland environment with very cold winters,
the fifty bands of the Blackfoot Indians of Canada and Montana had to
move a few miles several times each winter just to provide fresh forage for
their horses. And the Blackfeet did not have to worry about feeding cattle
or sheep. Mongolian herders move their tents and animal herds about
once a month throughout the winter. The Yamnaya herding system prob-
ably was equally mobile. 30

Yamnaya herders watched over their herds on horseback. At Repin on
the Don, 55% of the animal bones were horse bones. A horse skull was
placed in a Yamnaya grave in a kurgan cemetery overlooking the Caspian
Depression near Tsa-Tsa, south of the Volga, in kurgan 7, grave 12. Forty
horses were sacrificed in a Catacomb-period grave in the same cemetery in
kurgan 1, grave 5. 31 The grave probably was dug around 2500 BCE. An
adult male was buried in a contracted position on his left side, oriented
northeast. Fragments of red ochre and white chalk were placed by his hip.
A bronze dagger blade was found under his skull. Above his grave were
forty horse skulls arranged in two neat rows. Three ram skulls lay on the
floor of the grave. The amount of meat forty horses would have yielded —
assuming they were slightly bigger than Przewalskis, or about 400 kg live
weight — would be roughly 8,000 k, enough for four thousand portions of
2 k each. This suggests a funeral feast of amazing size. Horses were suit-
able animals for extraordinary ritual sacrifices.

J 26 Chapter ij

Wild Seeds and Dairy Foods in the Don- Volga Steppes

A ceramics lab in Samara has microscopically examined many Yamnaya
pot-sherds from graves, but no cultivated grain imprints appeared on
Yamnaya pottery here or anywhere else east of the Don. Yamnaya people
from the middle Volga region had teeth that were entirely free of caries
(no caries in 428 adult Yamnaya-Poltavka teeth from Samara oblast [see
figure 16.12]), which indicates a diet very low in starchy carbohydrates,
like the teeth of foragers. 32 Eastern Yamnaya people might have eaten
wild Chenopodium and Amaranthus seeds and even Phragmites reed tubers
and rhizomes. Analysis of pollen grains and phytoliths (silica bodies that
form inside plant cells) by N. Shishlina from Yamnaya grave floors in the
eastern Manych depression, in the steppes north of the North Caucasus,
found pollen and phytoliths of Chenopodium (goosefoot) and amaranths,
which can produce seed yields greater in weight per hectare than einkorn
wheat, and without cultivation. 33 Cultivated grain played a small role, if
any, in the eastern Yamnaya diet.

Although they were very tall and robust and showed few signs of sys-
temic infections, the Yamnaya people of the middle Volga region exhibited
significantly more childhood iron-deficiency anemia (bone lesions called
cribra orbitalia ) than did the skeletons from any earlier or later period (fig-
ure 13.6). A childhood diet too rich in dairy foods can lead to anemia, since
the high phosphorus content of milk can block the absorption of iron. 34
Health often declines in the early phases of a significant dietary change,
before the optimal mix of new foods has been established. Hie anomalous
Yamnaya peak in cribra orbitalia could also have resulted from an increased
parasite load among children, which again would be consistent with a liv-
ing pattern involving closer contact between animals and people. Recent
genetic research on the worldwide distribution of the mutation that cre-
ated lactose tolerance, which made a dairy-based diet possible, indicates
that it probably emerged first in the steppes west of the Ural Mountains
between about 4600 and 2800 BCE — the Late Eneolithic (Mikhailovka
I) and the EBA Yamnaya periods. 35 Selection for this mutation, now car-
ried by all adults who can tolerate dairy foods, would have been strong in a
population that had recently shifted to a mobile herding economy.

The importance of dairy foods might explain the importance of the cow
in Proto-Indo-European myth and ritual, even among people who de-
pended largely on sheep. Cattle were sacred because cows gave more milk

Wagon Dwellers J2?

Cribra Orbitalia Frequencies

Eneolithic Yamnaya Poltavka Potapovka Srubnaya

(n=45) (n=12) (n=18) (n=20) (n=166)

Period

Figure 13.6 Frequencies of cribra orbitalia, associated with anemia, in cul-
tures of the Samara oblast, middle Volga region. After Murphy and Khokhlov
2004.

than any other herd animal in the Eurasian steppe — twice as much as
mares and five times more than goats, according to the Soviet ethnogra-
pher Vainshtein. He noted that, even among the sheep herders of Tuva in
Siberia, an impoverished family of nomads that had lost all its sheep
would try to keep at least one cow because that meant they could eat. The
cow was the ultimate milk producer, even where herders counted their
wealth in sheep. 36

The Yamnaya wagon-based herding economy seems to have evolved in
the steppes east of the Don, like the earliest Yamnaya pottery styles. Un-
like the pottery and grave styles, the high-mobility, sheep-herding strat-
egy of eastern Yamnaya pastoralism did not spread westward into the
Dnieper steppes or northward into the middle Volga-Ural steppes, where
cattle breeding remained the dominant aspect of the herding economies.
Instead, it seems that social, religious, and political institutions (guest-
host agreements, patron-client contracts, and ancestor cults) spread with
the Yamnaya horizon. Some new chiefs from the east probably migrated
into the Dnieper steppes, but in the west they added cattle to their herds
and lived in fortified home bases.

J 28 Chapter ij

Yamnaya Social Organization

The speakers of late Proto-Indo-European expressed thanks for sons, fat
cattle, and swift horses to Sky Father, *dyew p?ter, a male god whose
prominence probably reflected the importance of fathers and brothers in
the herding units that composed the core of earthly social organization.
The vocabulary for kin relations in Proto-Indo-European was that of a
people who lived in a patrilineal, patrilocal social world, meaning that
rights, possessions, and responsibilities were inherited only from the fa-
ther (not the mother), and residence after marriage was with or near the
husband’s family. Kinship terms referring to grandfather, father, brother,
and husband’s brother survive in clearly corresponding roots in nearly all
Indo-European languages, whereas those relating to wife and wife’s fam-
ily are few, uncertain, and variable. Kinship structure is only one aspect of
social organization, but in tribal societies it was the glue that held social
units together. We will see, however, that where the linguistic evidence
suggests a homogeneous patri-centered Proto-Indo-European kinship
system, the archaeological evidence of actual behavior is more variable.

As Jim Mallory admitted years ago, we know very little about the social
meanings of kurgan cemeteries, and kurgan cemeteries are all the archae-
ological evidence left to us over much of the Yamnaya world. 37 We can
presume that they were visible claims to territory, but we do not know the
rules by which they were first established or who had the right to be buried
there or how long they were used before they were abandoned. Archaeolo-
gists tend to write about them as static finished objects, but when they
were first made they were dynamic, evolving monuments to specific peo-
ple, clans, and events.

Gender and the Meaning of Kurgan Burial

We can be confident that kurgans were not used as family cemeteries.
Mallory’s review of 2,216 Yamnaya graves showed that the median Yam-
naya kurgan contained fewer than 3 Yamnaya graves. About 25% contained
just 1 grave. Children never were buried alone in the central or principal
grave — that status was limited to adults. A count of kurgans per century in
the well-studied and well-dated Samara River valley, in the middle Volga
region, indicated that Yamnaya kurgans were built rarely, only one every
five years or so even in regions with many Yamnaya cemeteries. So kurgans
commemorated the deaths of special adults, not of everyone in the social

Wagon Dwellers J 29

group or even of everyone in the distinguished person’s family. In the
lower Volga, 80% of the Yamnaya graves contained males. E. Murphy and
A. Khokhlov have confirmed that 80% of the sexable Yamnaya-Poltavka
graves in the middle Volga region also contained males. In Ukraine, males
predominated but not as strongly. In the steppes north of the North Cau-
casus, both in the eastern Manych steppes and in the western Kuban-Azov
steppes, females and males appeared about equally in central graves and in
kurgan graves generally. Mallory described the near-equal gender distribu-
tion in 165 Yamnaya graves in the eastern Manych region, and Gei gave
similar gender statistics for 400 Novotitorovskaya graves in the Kuban-
Azov steppes. Even in the middle Volga region some kurgans have central
graves containing adult females, as at Krasnosamarskoe IV. Males were not
always given the central place under kurgans even in regions where they
strongly tended to occupy the central grave, and in the steppes north of the
North Caucasus (where Maikop influence was strongest before the Yam-
naya period) males and females were buried equally. 38

The male-centered funerals of the Volga-Ural region suggest a more
male-centered eastern social variant within the Yamnaya horizon, an ar-
chaeological parallel to the male-centered deities reconstructed for eastern
Indo-European mythological traditions. But even on the Volga the people
buried in central graves were not exclusively males. In the patrilocal, patri-
lineal society reconstructed by linguists for Proto-Indo-European speak-
ers, all lineage heads would have been males. The appearance of adult
females in one out of five kurgan graves, including central graves, suggests
that gender was not the only factor that determined who was buried under
a kurgan. Why were adult females buried in central graves under kurgans
even on the Volga? Among later steppe societies women could occupy so-
cial positions normally assigned to men. About 20% of Scythian-Sarmatian
“warrior graves” on the lower Don and lower Volga contained females
dressed for battle as if they were men, a phenomenon that probably in-
spired the Greek tales about the Amazons. It is at least interesting that the
frequency of adult females in central graves under Yamnaya kurgans in the
same region, but two thousand years earlier, was about the same. Perhaps
the people of this region customarily assigned some women leadership
roles that were traditionally male. 39

Kurgan Cemeteries and Mobility

Were the kurgans in a cemetery built together in a rapid sequence and
then abandoned, or did people stay around them and use them regularly

JJO Chapter 13

Wagon Dwellers jjr

for longer periods of time? For interval dating between kurgans it would
be ideal to obtain radiocarbon dates from all the kurgans in a cemetery. In
a Yamnaya cemetery, that would usually be from three to as many as forty
or fifty kurgans. Very few kurgan cemeteries have been subjected to this
intensity of radiocarbon dating.

We can try to approximate the time interval between kurgans from the
210 radiocarbon dates on Yamnaya graves published in 2003 by Telegin
and his colleagues. In his list we find nineteen Yamnaya kurgan cemeter-
ies for which there are radiocarbon dates from at least two kurgans in the
same cemetery. In eleven of these nineteen, more than half, at least two
kurgans yielded radiocarbon dates that are statistically indistinguishable
(see table 13.3 for radiocarbon dates). This suggests that kurgans were
built rapidly in clusters. In many cases, the cemetery was then abandoned
for a period of centuries before it was reused. For example, at the Poltavka
cemetery of Krasnosamarskoe IV in the middle Volga region we can show
this pattern, because we excavated all three kurgans in a small kurgan
group and obtained multiple radiocarbon dates from each (figure 13.7).
Like many kurgan groups in Ukraine, all three kurgans here were built
within an indistinguishably brief time. The central graves all dated about
2700-2600 BCE (dates reduced by 200 radiocarbon years to account for
the measured 15 N in the human bone used for the date), and then the cem-
etery was abandoned. Cemeteries like Krasnosamarskoe IV were used
intensively for very short periods.

If pastures were like the cemeteries that marked them, then they were
used briefly and abandoned. This episodic pasturing pattern, similar to
swidden horticulture, possibly was encouraged by similar conditions — a
low-productivity environment demanding frequent relocation. But herd-
ing, unlike swidden horticulture, required large pastures for each animal,
and it could produce trade commodities (wool, felt, leather) if the herds
were sufficiently large. To “rest” pastures under these circumstances would
have been attractive only at low population densities. 40 It could have hap-
pened when the new Yamnaya economy was expanding into the previously
unexploited pastures between the river valleys. But as the population of
wagon-driving herders grew during the Early Bronze Age, some pastures
began to show signs of overuse. A. A. Golyeva established that EBA Yam-
naya kurgans in the Manych steppes were built on pristine soils and grasses,
but many MBA Catacomb- culture kurgans were built on soils that had
already been overgrazed. 41 Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries were dynamic as-
pects of a new herding system during its initial expansionary phase.

Figure 13.7 Krasnosamarskoe cemetery IV, kurgan 1, early Poltavka culture
on the middle Volga. Three graves were created simultaneously when the kur-
gan was raised, about 2800 BCE: the central grave, covered by a layer of clay,
a peripheral grave to its southeast, and an overlying grave in the kurgan.
Author s excavation.

Proto-Indo-European Chiefs

The speakers of Proto-Indo-European followed chiefs (*weik-potis) who
sponsored feasts and ceremonies and were immortalized in praise poetry.
The richer Yamnaya graves probably commemorated such individuals. The
dim outlines of a social hierarchy can be extracted from the amount of
labor required to build kurgans. A larger kurgan probably meant that a
larger number of people felt obligated to respond to the death of the person

332 Chapter 13

Wagon Dwellers jjj

buried in the central grave. Most graves contained nothing but the body,
or in some cases just the head, with clothing, perhaps a bead or two, reed
mats, and wooden beams. The skin of a domestic animal with a few leg
or head bones attached was an unusual gift, appearing in about 15% of
graves, and a copper dagger or axe was very rare, appearing in less than
5%. Sometimes a few sherds of pottery were thrown into the grave. It is
difficult to define social roles on the basis of such slight evidence.

Do big kurgans contain the richest graves? Kurgan size and grave wealth
have been compared in at least two regions, in the Ingul River valley west
of the Dnieper in Ukraine (a sample of 37 excavated Yamnaya kurgans),
and in the Volga-Ural region (a sample of more than 90 kurgans). 42 In both
regions kurgans were easily divided into widely disparate size classes —
three classes in Ukraine and four on the Volga. In both regions the class 1
kurgans were 50 m or more in diameter, about the width of a standard
American football field (or two-thirds the width of a European soccer
field), and their construction required more than five hundred man-days,
meaning that five hundred people might have worked for one day to build
them, or one hundred people for five days, or some other combination to-
taling five hundred.

The biggest kurgans were not built over the richest central graves in ei-
ther region. Although the largest class 1 kurgans did contain rich graves,
so did smaller kurgans. In both regions wealthy graves occurred both in
the central position under a kurgan and in peripheral graves. In the Ingul
valley, where there were no metal-rich graves in the study sample, more
objects were found in peripheral graves than in central graves. In some
cases, where we have radiocarbon dates for many graves under a single
kurgan, we can establish through overlapping radiocarbon dates that the
central grave and a richer peripheral grave were dug simultaneously in a
single funeral ceremony, as at Krasnosamarskoe IV. The richest graves in
some Novosvobodnaya kurgans, including the Klady cemetery, were pe-
ripheral graves, located off-center under the mound. It could be mislead-
ing to count the objects in peripheral graves, including some wheeled
vehicle sacrifices, as separate from the central grave. In at least some cases,
a richer peripheral grave accompanied the central grave in the same fu-
neral ceremony.

Elite status was marked by artifacts as well as architecture, and the most
widespread indication of status was the presence of metal grave goods. The
largest metal artifact found in any Yamnaya grave was laid on the left arm
of a male buried in Kutuluk cemetery I, kurgan 4, overlooking the Kinel
River, a tributary of the Samara River in the Samara oblast east of the

Figure 13.8 Kutuluk cemetery I, kurgan 4, grave 1, middle
Volga region. An Early Yamnaya male with a large copper mace
or club, the heaviest metal object of the Yamnaya horizon. Pho-
tograph and excavation by P. Kuznetsov; see Kuznetsov 2005.

Volga (figure 13.8). A solid copper club or mace weighing 750 gm, it was
48.7 cm long and more than 1 cm thick, with a diamond cross-section.
The kurgan was medium-sized, 21 m in diameter and less than 1 m high,
but the central grave pit (gr. 1) was large. The male was oriented east, po-
sitioned supine with raised knees, with ochre at his head, hips, and feet —
a classic early Yamnaya grave type. Two samples of bone taken from his

334 Chapter ij

skeleton were dated about 3100-2900 BCE (4370 ±75 AA12570 and
4400±70 BP OxA 4262), but 15 N levels suggest that the date probably
was too old and should be revised to about 2900-2700 BCE.

In the Samara River valley, near the village of Utyevka on the flood-
plain of the Samara River, was the richest steppe grave of the Yamnaya-
Poltavka period. Utyevka cemetery I, kurgan 1 was 110 m in diameter.
Central grave 1 was a Yamnaya-Poltavka grave containing an adult male,
positioned supine with legs in an uncertain position. He was buried with
two golden rings with granulated decoration, unique objects with analo-
gies in the North Caucasus or Anatolia; also a copper-tanged dagger, a
copper pin with a forged iron head, a flat copper axe, a copper awl, a cop-
per sleeved axe of the classic Volga-Ural type Ila with a slightly rising
blade, and a polished stone pestle 43 (figure 13.9). In the Volga-Ural region
numerous Yamnaya graves contained metal daggers, chisels, and cast
shaft-hole axes.

Overall, the wide disparities in labor invested in kurgans of different
sizes, from 10 m to more than 110 m in diameter, indicate a broad sociopo-
litical hierarchy, though one not always correlated with grave wealth. The
class 1 kurgans tended to contain rich graves but they were not always the
central grave, and rich graves frequently occurred in smaller kurgans.
Chernykh observed that kurgans seem to have been bigger, as a rule, in
the North Pontic steppes, where many also had additional stone elements
including cromlechs or curbs, carved stone stelae, and even coverings of
stone or gravel, whereas the graves of the Volga-Ural region were richer in
metal but had simpler earthen monuments. 44

The Identity of the Metalworker

The craft of the steppe metalsmith improved and became more sophisti-
cated under Yamnaya chiefs. Metalworkers in the Pontic-Caspian steppes
made cast-copper objects regularly for the first time, and in late Yamnaya
they even experimented with forged iron. Thin seams of copper ore (azur-
ite, malachite) are interbedded with iron-bearing sandstones between the
central North Caucasus region (Krasnodar) and the Ural Mountains (Kar-
galy), including the entire Volga-Ural region. These ores are exposed by
erosion on the sides of many stream valleys, and were mined by Yamnaya
metalworkers. A Yamnaya grave at Pershin in Orenburg oblast, near the
enormous copper deposits and mines at Kargaly on the middle Ural River,
contained a male buried with a two-piece mold for a sleeved, one-bladed
axe of Chernykhs type 1. The grave is dated about 2900-2700 BCE

33 6 Chapter 13

(4200 ±60, BM-3157). A Yamnaya mining pit has been found at Kargaly
with radiocarbon dates of the same era. Almost all the copper objects from
the Volga-Ural region were made of “clean” copper from these local
sources. Although the cast sleeved single-bladed axes and tanged daggers
of the early Yamnaya period imitated Novosvobodnaya originals, they
were made locally from local copper ores. North Caucasian arsenical
bronze was imported by people buried in graves in the Kalmyk steppe
south of the lower Volga and in Kemi-Oba sites on the Crimean penin-
sula, but not in the Volga-Ural steppes. 45

The grave at Pershin was not the only smith s grave of the period. Met-
alworkers were clearly identified in several Yamnaya-period graves, per-
haps because metalworking was still a form of shamanic magic, and the
tools remained dangerously polluted by the spirit of the dead smith. Two
Post-Mariupol smiths graves on the Dnieper (chapter 12) probably were
contemporary with early Yamnaya, as was a smiths grave with axe molds,
crucibles, and tu/ieres in a Novotitorovskaya-culture grave in the Kuban
steppes at Lebedi I (figure 13.10). Copper slag, the residue of metalwork-
ing, was included in other graves, as at Utyevka I kurgan 2. 46

One unappreciated aspect of EBA and MBA steppe metallurgy was
its experimentation with iron. The copper pin in Utyevka kurgan 1 with
a forged iron head was not unique. A Catacomb-period grave at Gera-
simovka on the Donets, probably dated around 2500 BCE, contained a
knife with a handle made of arsenical bronze and a blade made of iron.
The iron did not contain magnetite or nickel, as would be expected in me-
teoric iron, so it is thought to have been forged. Iron objects were rare, but
they were part of the experiments conducted by steppe metalsmiths dur-
ing the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, long before iron began to be used
in Hittite Anatolia or the Near East. 47

The Stone Stelae of the North Pontic Steppes

The Yamnaya horizon developed in the Pontic-Caspian steppes largely
because an innovation in land transport, wagons, was added to horseback
riding to make a new kind of herding economy possible. At the same time
an innovation in sea transport, the introduction of the multi-oared long-
boat, probably was responsible for the permanent occupation of the Cy-
cladic Islands by Grotta-Pelos mariners about 3300-3200 BCE, and for
the initial development of the northwest Anatolian trading communities
such as Kum Tepe that preceded the founding of Troy. 48 These two horizons,
one on the sea and the other on a sea of grass, came into contact around
the shores of the Black Sea.

Figure 13.10 Lebedi cemetery I, kurgan 3, grave 10, a metal workers gave of the
late Novotitorovskaya culture, perhaps 2800-2500 BCE, Kuban River steppes.
He wore a boars-tusk pendant. Under his arm was a serpentine hammer-axe
{upper left). By his feet was a complete smithing kit: heavy stone hammers and
abraders, sharp-edged flint tools, a round clay crucible {upper right), and axe
molds for both flat and sleeved axes. After Gei 1986, figures 1, 4, 6, 7, and 9.

58 mi

Olanesti

Kernosovka

grave 1

grave 2

Morel, France

Belogrudovka I

Yezevero,

Bulgaria

Akchokrak

Novoselovka

Kasperovka

Plachidol, Bulgaria \

Figure 13.11 Carved stone anthropomorphic stelae of the Pontic steppes, Bul-
garia, Troy I, and southeastern France. Graves 1 and 2 of Olanesti kurgan 2
0 upper left ), located in the lower Dniester steppes, are pre-Usatovo, so before
3300 BCE. The Yamnaya stelae of Ukraine and Crimea (Kernosovka, Belogru-
dovka, Akchorak, Novoselovka, and Kasperovka) and Bulgaria (Plachidol,
Yezerovo) probably date 3300—2500 BCE. Parallels at Troy I and in the moun-
tains of southeastern France (Morel) are striking. After Telegin and Mallory
1994; and Yarovoy 1985.

VggjcVI

-

Wagon Dwellers jjg

The Kemi-Oba culture was a kurgan-building culture dated 3200-2600
BCE centered in the Crimean peninsula. Its dark-surfaced pottery was a
continuation of Mikhailovka I ceramic traditions. Kemi-Oba grave cists
were lined with flat-shaped stones, some painted in geometric designs,
a custom shared with Novosvobodnaya royal graves (e.g., the Tsar kurgan
at Nalchik). Kemi-Oba graves also contained large, stone funeral stelae,
many with human heads carved at the top and arms, hands, belts, tunics,
weapons, crooks, sandals, and even animal scenes sometimes carved on
one or both faces (figure 13.11) This custom spread from the Crimean
peninsula into both the Caucasus (where only a few stelae appeared) and
the western Pontic steppes. At least three hundred stelae have been found
in Yamnaya and Catacomb graves in the North Pontic steppes, usually
re-used as grave-pit covers, with more than half concentrated between the
South Bug and Ingul rivers. 49 The carving of funeral stelae seems to have
expanded in frequency and elaboration in the Crimean and Pontic steppes
after about 3300 BCE. Their original purpose is unknown. Perhaps they
marked the future site of a kurgan cemetery before the first kurgan was
built, or maybe they marked the first kurgan until the second one was
built. In any case, they are usually found re-used as stone covers over grave
pits, sealed beneath kurgans.

Eerily similar stelae, with carved heads, bent arms, hands, weapons,
and even specific objects such as crooks, were carved in northern Tuscany
and the Italian piedmont at about the same time, and a fragment of a
similar-looking stela was built into a stone building in Troy I. It is difficult
to imagine that these widely separated but strikingly similar and contem-
poraneous funeral stelae were unconnected. A newly invigorated maritime
trade probably was responsible for carrying ideas and technologies across
the sea. The Yamnaya horizon spread across the Pontic-Caspian steppes
while an invigorated sea trade spread across the eastern Mediterranean. A
full understanding of the significance of the Yamnaya horizon requires an
understanding of its external relations — the subject of the next chapter.

Western Indo-European Languages 341

Chapter Fourteen

The Western Indo-European Languages

“A wild river full of possibilities flowed from my new tongue.”
— Andrew Lam, Learning a Language , Inventing a Future 2006

We will not understand the early expansion of the Proto-Indo-European
dialects by trying to equate language simply with artifact types. Material
culture often has little relationship to language. 1 have proposed an excep-
tion to that rule in the case of robust and persistent frontiers, but that does
seem to be an exception. The essence of language expansion is psychologi-
cal. The initial expansion of the Indo-European languages was the result
of widespread cultural shifts in group self-perception. Language replace-
ment always is accompanied by revised self-perceptions, a restructuring of
the cultural classifications within which the self is defined and repro-
duced. Negative evaluations associated with the dying language lead to a
descending series of reclassifications by succeeding generations, until no
one wants to speak like Grandpa any more. Language shift and the stig-
matization of old identities go hand in hand.

The pre-Indo-European languages of Europe were abandoned because
they were linked to membership in social groups that became stigmatized.
How that process of stigmatization happened is a fascinating question, and
the possibilities are much more varied than just invasion and conquest. In-
creased out-marriage, for example, can lead to language shift. The Gaelic
spoken by Scottish “fisher” folk was abandoned after World War II, when
increased mobility and new economic opportunities led to out-marriage
between Gaelic “fishers” and the surrounding English-speaking popula-
tion, and the formerly tightly closed and egalitarian “fisher” community
became intensely aware both of its low ranking in a larger world and of
alternative economic opportunities. Gaelic rapidly disappeared, although
only a few people — soldiers, professionals, teachers — moved very far. Simi-
larly, the general situation in Europe after 3300 BCE was one of increased

mobility, new pastoral economies, explicitly status-ranked political sys-
tems, and inter-regional connectivity — exactly the kind of context that
might have led to the stigmatization of the tightly closed identities associ-
ated with languages spoken by localized groups of village farmers. 1

The other side of understanding language shift is to ask why the identi-
ties associated with Indo-European languages were emulated and ad-
mired. It cannot have been because of some essential quality or inner
potential in Indo-European languages or people. Usually language shift
flows in the direction of paramount prestige and power. Paramount status
can attach to one ethnic group (Celt, Roman, Scythian, Turk, American)
for centuries, but eventually it flows away. So we want to know what in
this particular era attached prestige and power to the identities associated
with Proto-Indo-European speech — Yamnaya identities, principally. At
the beginning of this period, Indo-European languages still were spoken
principally by pastoral societies from the Pontic-Caspian steppes. Five
factors probably were important in enhancing their status:

1. Pontic-Caspian steppe societies were more familiar with horse breed-
ing and riding than anyone outside the steppes. They had many more
horses than anywhere else, and measurements show that their steppe
horses were larger than the native marsh and mountain ponies of central
and western Europe. Larger horses appeared in Baden, Cernavoda III,
and Cham sites in central Europe and the Danube valley about 3300-
3000 BCE, probably imported from the steppes. 2 Horses began to appear
commonly in most sites of the ETC culture in Transcaucasia at the same
time, and larger horses appeared among them, as in southeastern Anato-
lia at Norjuntepe. Steppe horse-breeders might also have had the most
manageable male bloodline — the genetic lineage of the original domesti-
cated male founder was preserved even in places with native wild popu-
lations (see chapter 10). If they had the largest, strongest, and most
manageable horses, and they had more than anyone else, steppe societies
could have grown rich by trading horses. In the sixteenth century the
Bukhara khanate in Central Asia, drawing on horse-breeding grounds in
the Ferghana valley, exported one hundred thousand horses annually just
to one group of customers: the Mughal rulers of India and Pakistan. Al-
though I am not suggesting anything near that scale, the annual demand
for steppe horses in Late Eneolithic/Early Bronze Age Europe could eas-
ily have totaled thousands of animals during the initial expansion of
horseback riding beyond the steppes. That would have made some steppe
horse dealers wealthy. 3

uo

J42 Chapter 14

2. Horseback riding shortened distances, so riders traveled farther than
walkers. In addition to the conceptual changes in human geography this
caused, riders gained two functional advantages. First, they could manage
herds larger than those tended by pedestrian herders, and could move
those larger herds more easily from one pasture to another. Any single
herder became more productive on horseback. Second, they could advance
to and retreat from raids faster than pedestrian warriors. Riders could
show up unexpectedly, dismount and attack people in their fields, run
back to their horses and get away quickly. The decline in the economic
importance of cultivation across Europe after 3300 BCE occurred in a
social setting of increased levels of warfare almost everywhere. Riding
probably added to the general increase in insecurity, making riding more
necessary, and expanding the market for horses (see paragraph above).

3. Proto-Indo-European institutions included a belief in the sanctity of
verbal contracts bound by oaths ( *h 1 oitos ), and in the obligation of patrons
(or gods) to protect clients (or humans) in return for loyalty and service.
“Let this racehorse bring us good cattle and good horses, male children
and all-nourishing wealth,” said a prayer accompanying the sacrifice of a
horse in the Rig Veda (1.162), a clear statement of the contract that bound
humans to the gods. In Proto-Indo-European religion generally the chasm
between gods and humans was bridged by the sanctity of oath-bound con-
tracts and reciprocal obligations, so these were undoubtedly important
tools regulating the daily behavior of the powerful toward the weak, at
least for people who belonged under the social umbrella. Patron-client
systems like this could incorporate outsiders as clients who enjoyed rights
and protection. This way of legitimizing inequality probably was an old
part of steppe social institutions, going back to the initial appearance of
differences in wealth when domesticated animals were accepted. 4

4. With the evolution of the Yamnaya horizon, steppe societies must
have developed a political infrastructure to manage migratory behavior. The
change in living patterns and mobility described in the previous chapter
cannot have happened without social effects. One of those might have
been the creation of mutual obligations of “hospitality” between guest-hosts
(?ghos-ti-). This institution, discussed in the last chapter, redefined who be-
longed under the social umbrella, and extended protection to new groups. It

would have been very useful as a new way to incorporate outsiders as people
with clearly defined rights and protections, as it was used from The Odyssey
to medieval Europe. ^ The apparent absence of this root in Anatolian and
Tocharian suggests that this might have been a new development connected
with the migratory behavior of the early Yamnaya horizon.

Western Indo-European Languages j 4 j

5. Finally, steppe societies had created an elaborate political theater
around their funerals, and perhaps on more cheerful public occasions as
well. Proto-Indo-European contained a vocabulary related to gift giving
and gift taking that is interpreted as referring to potlatch-like feasts meant
to build prestige and display wealth. The public performance of praise
poetry, animal sacrifices, and the distribution of meat and mead were cen-
tral elements of the show. Calvert Watkins found a special kind of song he
called the “praise of the gift” in Vedic, Greek, Celtic, and Germanic, and
therefore almost certainly in late Proto-Indo-European. Praise poems
proclaimed the generosity of a patron and enumerated his gifts. These per-
formances were both acclamations of identity and recruiting events. 6

Wealth, military power, and a more productive herding system probably
brought prestige and power to the identities associated with Proto-Indo-
European dialects after 3300 BCE. The guest-host institution extended
the protections of oath-bound obligations to new social groups. An Indo-
European-speaking patron could accept and integrate outsiders as clients
without shaming them or assigning them permanently to submissive roles,
as long as they conducted the sacrifices properly. Praise poetry at public
feasts encouraged patrons to be generous, and validated the language of the
songs as a vehicle for communicating with the gods who regulated every-
thing. All these factors taken together suggest that the spread of Proto-
Indo-European probably was more like a franchising operation than an
invasion. Although the initial penetration of a new region (or “market” in the
franchising metaphor) often involved an actual migration from the steppes
and military confrontations, once it began to reproduce new patron-client
agreements (franchises) its connection to the original steppe immigrants
became genetically remote, whereas the myths, rituals, and institutions that
maintained the system were reproduced down the generations. 7

The End of the Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture
and the Roots of the Western Branches

In this chapter we examine the archaeological evidence associated with the
initial expansion of the western Indo-European languages, including the
separation of Pre-Germanic, the ultimate ancestor of English. It is possible
to connect prehistoric languages with archaeological cultures in this partic-
ular time and place only because the possibilities are already constrained by
three critical parameters. These are (1) that the late Proto-Indo-European
dialects did expand; (2) that they expanded into eastern and central Europe

J44 Chapter 14

from a homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppes; and (3) that the separa-
tions of Pre-Italic, Pre-Celtic, and Pre-Germanic, at least, from late Proto-
Indo-European probably happened at about this time, between 3300 and
2500 BCE (see the conclusions of chapters 3 and 4).

The Roots of the Oldest Western Indo-European Branches

These constraints oblige us to turn our attention to the region just to the
west of the early Yamnaya territory, or west of the South Bug River valley,
beginning about 3300 BCE. On this frontier we can identify three archae-
ological cases of cross-cultural contact in which people from the western
Pontic steppes established long-term relationships with people outside the
steppe zone to their west during the steppe Early Bronze Age, 3300-2800
BCE. Each of these new intercultural meetings provided a context in
which language expansion might have occurred, and, given the constraints
just described, probably did. But each case happened differently.

The first occurrence involved close integration, noted particularly in pot-
tery but evident in other customs as well, between the steppe Usatovo
culture and the late Tripolye villages of the upper Dniester and Prut val-
leys (figure 14.1). It is fairly clear from the archaeological evidence that the
steppe aspect of the integrated culture had separate origins and stood in a
position of military dominance over the upland farmers, a situation that
would have encouraged the spread of the steppe language into the up-
lands. In the second case, people of the Yamnaya horizon moved in sig-
nificant numbers into the lower Danube valley and the Carpathian Basin.
This was a true “folk migration,” a massive and sustained flow of outsiders
into a previously settled landscape. Again there are archaeological signs,
in pottery particularly, of integration with the local Cotsofeni culture. In-
tegration with the locals would have provided a medium for language
shift. In the third case, the Yamnaya horizon expanded toward the border
with the Corded Ware horizon on the headwaters of the Dniester in far
northwestern Ukraine. In some places it appears there was no integration
at all, but on the east flank of this contact zone, near the middle Dnieper,
a hybrid border culture emerged. It is probably safe to assume that the
separations of several western Indo-European branches were associated
somehow with these events. The linguistic evidence suggests that Italic,
Celtic, and Germanic, at least, separated next after Tocharian (discussed
in the previous chapter). The probable timing of separations suggests that
they happened around this time, and these are the visible events that seem
like good candidates.

Western Indo-European Languages 345

Pripet

Marshes

i#!>Zavalovka

Zimne

Bronocice • 'I'J.

.•Sofievka

CORDED

fj-OBUi.

a Mpho

ivanoN. ^

Frankovsk^sA

Zhvanets

[Hortobagy^->
' •/rkus (
^•Ketegyhaza*
^MuresR^

°\ '^•Vikhvatintsii ^
\panku •lHolerkani ^^0

RyseltiAf

\ o / A*Vishnevoe

V^r C, ^Kholmskoea

COTSOFENI

^Plachidol

^Ezerovo

Yamnaya migration route

'Stara-Zagora
•Ezero y
Kovachevo

Yamnaya settlement
1 region

Areas occupied in
Tripolye Cl and
abandoned in
Tripolye C2

AEGEAN

Figure 14.1 Yamnaya migrations into the Danube valley and the east Car-

pathian piedmont, 3100-2600 BCE. The older western IE branches probably

evolved from dialects scattered by these migrations.

J4& Chapter 14

The End of the Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture

The people whose dialects would separate to become the root speech com-
munities for the northwestern Indo-European language branches (Pre-
Germanic, Pre-Baltic, and Pre-Slavic) probably moved initially toward
the northwest. That would mean moving through or into Late Tripolye
territory if it happened between 3300 and 2600 BCE, the time span of the
final, staggering C2 phase of the Tripolye culture, after which all Tripolye
traditions disappeared entirely. Hie period began with the sudden aban-
donment of large regions near the steppe border, including almost the
entire South Bug valley. In the regions where the Tripolye culture sur-
vived, no Tripolye C2 towns had more than thirty to forty houses. The
houses themselves were smaller and less substantial. Painted fine ceramics
declined in frequency, while clinging to old motifs and styles. Domestic
rituals utilizing clay female figurines became less frequent, the female
traits became stylized and abstract, and then the rituals disappeared en-
tirely. Two major episodes of change can be seen. The first major shock
came at the transition from Tripolye Cl to C2 about 3300 BCE, simulta-
neously with the appearance of the early Yamnaya horizon. The second
and final sweep of change erased the last remnants of Tripolye customs
around 2800— 2600 BCE, when the early Yamnaya period ended.

The first crisis, at the Tripolye C1/C2 transition about 3300 BCE (table
14.1), is evident in the abandonment of large regions that had contained
hundreds of Tripolye Cl towns and villages. The vacated regions included
the Ros’ River valley, a western tributary of the Dnieper south of Kiev, near
the steppe border; all of the middle and lower South Bug valley, near the
steppe border; and the southern Siret and Prut valleys in southeastern Ro-
mania (between Iasi and Birlad), also near the steppe border. After this
event almost no Cucuteni-Tripolye sites survived in what is now Romania,
so after two thousand years the Cucuteni sequence came to an end. All
these regions had been densely occupied during Cucuteni B2/Tripolye Cl.
We do not know what happened to the evacuated populations. A Yam-
naya kurgan was erected on the ruins of the Tripolye Cl super town at
Maidanetske (see figure 12.7) in the South Bug valley, but this seems to
have happened centuries after its abandonment. Other kurgans in the South
Bug valley (Serezlievka) contained Tripolye C2 figurines and pots, so it is
clear that kurgan-building people occupied the South Bug valley, but their
population seems to have been sparse, and their use of Tripolye pottery has
led to arguments over their origins. 8 With the disappearance of agricultural
towns from most of the South Bug valley, surviving Tripolye populations

Western Indo-European Languages 347

Table 14.1

Selected Radiocarbon Dates for the Usatovo Culture, other Tripolye C2
naya graves in the Danube valley.

Lab Number

1. Usatovo culture

BP Date

Sample

groups, and Yam-

Calibrated Date

Mayaki settlement, lower Dniester

JO-282 4580±120 charcoal from fortification ditch 3520-3090 BCE

Ki-281 4475 ±130 same 3360-2930 BCE

Bln-629 4400 ±100 same 3320-2900 BCE

UCLA 1642B 4375±60 same 3090-2900 BCE

Le-645 4340 ±65 same 3080-2880 BCE

Usatovo, flat cemetery II, unrecorded grave number

UCLA-1642A 4330±60 ?bone 3020-2880 BCE

2. Tripolye C2 sites on the middle Dnieper

Gorodsk setdement, fortified promontory, Teterev River

GrN-5090 4551±35 ?bone 3370-3110 BCE

Ki-6752 4495 ±45 shell 3340-3090 BCE

Sofievka cemetery, Borispol district, Kiev region

Ki-5012 4320±70 grave 1, cremated bone 3080-2870 BCE

Ki-5029 4300 ±45 charcoal 3020-2870 BCE

Ki-5013 4270±90 square Mil, cremated bone 3020-2690 BCE

3. Tripolye C2 sites on the upper Dniester

Zhvanets setdement, early C2, upper Dniester, Kamianets- Podolsky region
Ki-6745 4530±50 animal bone, pit-house 1 3360-3100 BCE

Ki-6743 4480 ±40 animal bone, surface house 2 3340-3090 BCE

Ki-6754 4380 ±60 charcoal 3100-2910 BCE

Ki-6744 4355 ±60 animal bone, pit-house 6 3080-2890 BCE

4. Yamnaya graves in the Danube valley

Poruchik-Geshanovo kurgan cemetery, northeast Bulgaria

Bln-3302 4360±50 charcoal from unpublished grave 3080-2900 BCE

Bln-3303 4110±50 same 2860-2550 BCE

Bln-3301 4080 ±50 same 2860-2490 BCE

3370-3110 BCE
3340-3090 BCE

3080-2870 BCE
3020-2870 BCE
3020-2690 BCE

348 Chapter 14

Table 14.1 ( continued )

Lab Number BP Date Sample Calibrated Date

Plachidol kurgan cemetery 1, northeast Bulgaria

Bln-2504 4269±60 charcoal, grave 2 with stela 3010-2700 BCE

Bln-2501 4170±50 charcoal, grave 1 with wagon 2880-2670 BCE

Baia Hamangia, Danube delta, Romania

GrN-1995 4280165 charcoal from grave 3020-2700 BCE

Bln-29 40901160 charcoal from grave 2880-2460 BCE

Ketegyhaza kurgan 3, grave 4 (latest grave in kurgan 3), eastern Hungary

Bln-609 4265 1 80 charcoal from grave 3020-2690 BCE

resolved into two geographic groups north and south of the South Bug (see
figure 13.1).

The northern Tripolye C2 group was located on the middle Dnieper
and its tributaries around Kiev, where the forest-steppe graded into the
closed northern forest. Cross-border assimilation with steppe cultures
had begun on the middle Dnieper during Tripolye Cl, as at Chapaevka
(see figures 12.2, 12.6), and this process continued during Tripolye C2.
At towns like Gorodsk, west of the Dnieper, and cemeteries like So-
fievka, east of the Dnieper, the mix of cultural elements included late
Sredni Stog, early Yamnaya, late Tripolye, and various influences from
southern Poland (late Baden, late TRB). The hybrid that emerged from
all these intercultural meetings slowly became its own distinct culture.

The southern Tripolye C2 group, centered in the Dniester valley, was
closely integrated with a steppe culture, the Usatovo culture, described in
detail below. The two surviving late Tripolye settlement centers on the
Dnieper and Dniester continued to interact — Dniester flint continued to
appear in Dnieper sites — but they also slowly grew apart. For reasons that
will be clear in the next chapter, I believe that the emerging hybrid culture
on the middle Dnieper played an important role in the evolution of both the
Pre-Baltic and Pre-Slavic language communities after 2800-2600 BCE.
Pre-Germanic is usually assigned an earlier position in branching diagrams.
If early Pre-Germanic speakers moved away from the Proto-Indo-European
homeland toward the northwest, as seems likely, they moved through one of
these Tripolye settlement centers before 2800 BCE. Perhaps it was the
other one in the Dniester valley. Its steppe partner was the Usatovo culture.

Western Indo-European Languages 349

Steppe Overlords and Tripolye Clients: The Usatovo Culture

The Usatovo culture appeared about 3300-3200 BCE in the steppes around
the mouth of the Dniester River, a strategic corridor that reached north-
west into southern Poland. The rainfall-farming zone in the Dniester valley
had been densely occupied by Cucuteni-Tripolye communities for millen-
nia, but they never established settlements in the steppes. Kurgans had
overlooked the Dniester estuary in the steppes since the Suvorovo migra-
tion about 4000 BCE; these are assigned to various groups including
Mikhailovka I and the Cernavoda I— III cultures. Usatovo represented the
rapid evolution of a new level of social and political integration between
lowland steppe and upland farming communities. Tie steppe element used
Tripolye material culture but clearly declared its greater prestige, wealth,
and military power. The upland farmers who lived on the border itself ad-
opted the steppe custom of inhumation burial in a cemetery, but they did
not erect kurgans or take weapons to their graves. This integrated culture
appeared in the Dniester valley just after the abandonment of all the Tri-
polye Cl towns in the South Bug valley on one side and the final Cucuteni
B2 towns in southern Romania on the other. The chaos caused by the dis-
solution of hundreds of Cucuteni-Tripolye farming communities probably
convinced the Tripolye townspeople of the middle Dniester valley to accept
the status of clients. Explicit patronage defined the Usatovo culture. 9

Cultural Integration between Usatovo and Upland Tripolye Towns

The stone-walled houses of the Usatovo settlement occupied the brow
of a grassy ridge overlooking a bay near modern Odessa, the best sea-
port on the northwest coast of the Black Sea. Usatovo covered about
4-5 ha. A stone defensive wall probably defended the town on its sea-
ward side. The settlement was largely destroyed by modern village con-
struction and limestone quarrying prior to the first excavation by M. F.
Boltenko in 1921, but parts of it survived (figure 14.2). Behind the an-
cient town four separate cemeteries crowned the hillcrest, all of them
broadly contemporary. Two were kurgan cemeteries and two were flat-
grave cemeteries. In one of the kurgan cemeteries, the one closest to the
town, half the central graves contained men buried with bronze daggers
and axes. These bronze weapons occurred in no other graves, not even
in the second kurgan cemetery. Female figurines were limited to the
flat-grave cemeteries and the settlement, never occurring in the kurgan

jjo Chapter 14

flat-grave cemetery y'

excavated settlement
.area

built-over A
by modern village

Usatovo

settlement

and

cemetery

modern cemetery

100m

Figure 14.2 The Usatovo settlement (inside dotted line), kurgan cemeteries,
and flat-grave cemeteries within the modern bay-side village of Usatovo, at
the northeastern edge of the city of Odessa. After Patovka 1976 (village plan)
and Zbenovich 1974 (kurgans).

graves. The flat-grave cemeteries were similar to flat-grave cemeteries
that appeared outside Tripolye villages in the uplands, notably at Vikh-
vatinskii on the Dniester, where excavation of perhaps one-third of the
cemetery yielded sixty-one graves of people with a gracile Mediterra-
nean skull-and-face configuration. Upland cemeteries appeared at sev-
eral other Tripolye sites (Holerkani, Ry§e§ti, and Danku) located at the
border between the steppes and the rainfall agriculture zone in the
forest-steppe.

Clearly segregated funeral rituals (kurgan or flat grave) for different
social groups appeared also at Mayaki, another Usatovo settlement on the

Western Indo-European Languages jy

Dniester. The dagger chiefs of Usatovo probably dominated a hierarchy of
steppe chiefs. Their relationship with the Tripolye villages in the Prut and
Dniester forest-steppe seems unequal. Kurgan graves and graves contain-
ing weapons occurred only in the steppe. The upland Vikhvatinskii cem-
etery contained female figurines, but no metal weapons and only one
copper object, a simple awl. Probably the Usatovo chiefs were patrons who
received tribute, including fine painted pottery, from upland Tripolye cli-
ents. This relationship would have provided a prestige and status gradient
that encouraged the adoption of the Usatovo language by late Tripolye
villagers.

Usatovo is classified in all eastern European accounts as a Tripolye C2
culture. All eastern European archaeological cultures are defined first
(sometimes only!) by ceramic types. Tripolye C2 pottery was a defining
feature of Usatovo graves and settlements (figure 14.3). But the Usatovo
culture was different from any Tripolye variant in that all the approxi-
mately fifty known Usatovo sites appeared exclusively in the steppe zone,
at first around the mouth of the Dniester and later spreading to the Prut
and Danube estuaries. Its funeral rituals were entirely derived from steppe
traditions. Its coarse pottery, although made in standard Tripolye shapes,
was shell-tempered and decorated with cord-impressed geometric designs
like those of Yamnaya pottery. If the settlements were not so disturbed,
we might be able to say whether they included compounds where Tri-
polye craftspeople worked as specialists. To explore how the Tripolye ele-
ment was integrated in Usatovo society we have to look at other kinds of
evidence.

The Usatovo economy was based primarily on sheep and goats (58-76%
of bones at the Usatovo and Mayaki settlements, respectively). Sheep
clearly predominated over goats, suggesting a wool butchering pattern. 10
At the same time, during Tripolye C2, clay loom weights and conical
spindle whorls increased in frequency in upland towns in both the middle
Dnieper and the Dniester regions, as if the Tripolye textile industry had
accelerated. Usatovo settlements contained comparatively few spindle-
whorls. 11 Perhaps upland Tripolye weavers made the wool from steppe
sheep into finished textiles in a reciprocal exchange arrangement. Usatovo
herders also kept cattle (28-13%) and horses (14-11%). Horse images were
incised on two stone kurgan stelae at Usatovo (kurgan cemetery I, k. 11
and 3) and on a pot from an Usatovo grave at Tudorovo (figure 14.3n).
Horses were important symbolically probably because riding was impor-
tant in herding and raiding, and possibly because horses were important
trade commodities.

Figure 14.3 Usatovo-culture ceramics (a, e, h, p, q, r) Usatovo kurgan ceme-
tery I; (b) Tudorovo flat grave; (c) Sarata kurgan; (d) Shabablat kurgan; (f)
Parkany kurgan 182; (g, j, 1) Usatovo kurgan cemetery II; (i) Parkany kurgan
91; (k) abstract figurine from Usatovo flat grave cemetery II; (m) Mayaki
settlement; (n) Tudorovo kurgan; (o) Usatovo flat grave cemetery II; (s) May-
aki settlement, probably a cheese strainer. Also shown: a painted fine bowl
from the Tripolye C2 cemetery at Vikhvatintsii. After Zbenovich 1968.

Western Indo-European Languages j$j

Impressions in pottery at the Usatovo settlement showed cultivated
wheat (mostly emmer and bread wheats), barley, millet (frequent), oats (fre-
quent), and peas. 12 The settlement also contained grinding stones and flint
sickle teeth with characteristic edge gloss from cereal harvesting. This was
the first evidence for cereal cultivation in the Dniester steppes, and, in fact,
it is surprising, since rainfall agriculture is risky where precipitation is less
than 350 mm per year. The grain would have been grown more easily in the
upland settlements, perhaps cultivated by Tripolye people who resided
part-time at Usatovo.

Tripolye C2 fine pots were particularly valued as grave gifts for the
chiefs who died at Usatovo. Tripolye pots with an orange clay fabric,
fired at almost 900°C, constituted 18% of the ceramics at the Usatovo
settlement but 30% in the kurgan graves (figure 14.3, top). About 80%
of the pottery at Usatovo and at other Usatovo-culture settlements was
shell-tempered gray or brown ware, undecorated or decorated with cord
impressions, and fired at only 700°C. This ware was made like steppe
pottery. Though the shapes were like those made in the uplands by late
Tripolye potters, some decorative motifs resembled those seen on Yam-
naya Mikhailovka II-style pottery. A few of these shell-tempered gray
pots at Usatovo were coated with a thick orange slip to make them look
like fine Tripolye pots, indicating that the two kinds of pottery really
were regarded as different. 13

The painted Tripolye pots in Usatovo kurgan graves were most similar
to those of the Tripolye C2 settlements at Brynzeny III on the Prut and
Vikhvatintsii on the Dniester. Vikhvatinskii was 175 km up the Dniester
from Usatovo near the steppe border, and Brynzeny III was about 350 km
distant, hidden in the steep forested valleys of the East Carpathian pied-
mont. A fine painted pot of Brynzeny type was buried in the central grave
of kurgan cemetery I, kurgan 12, at Usatovo, with an imported Maikop
pot and a riveted bronze dagger. At this time Brynzeny III still had
thirty-seven two-story ploshchadka houses, clay ovens, loom weights for
large vertical looms, and female figurines. These traditional Tripolye cus-
toms survived in towns that showed ceramic connections with Usatovo,
perhaps because patron-client agreements protected them. As the identi-
ties associated with the dying Tripolye culture were stigmatized and those
associated with the Usatovo chiefs were emulated, people who lived at
places like Brynzeny III and Vikhvatintsii might well have become bilin-
gual. Their children then shifted to the Usatovo language.

Although fine Tripolye pots were preferred grave gifts for the Usatovo
elite, the Tripolye culture itself occupied a secondary position of power

354 Chapter 14

and prestige. This is clearest in funeral customs. At Usatovo the chiefs
buried under the kurgan graves were richer and more important than the
people buried in the flat graves, and the flat graves were exactly repro-
duced in the upland Tripolye cemeteries at Vikhvatinskii and Holerkani.

The Usatovo Chiefs and Long-distance Trade

Another aspect of the Usatovo economy was long-distance trade, probably
conducted by sea. All six known Usatovo settlements overlooked shallow
coastal river mouths that would have made good harbors. These river
mouths are today closed off from the sea by siltation, creating brackish
lakes called limans, but they would have been more open to the sea in
3000 BCE. The sherds of small ceramic jugs and bowls of the Cernavoda
III and Cernavoda II types from the lower Danube valley made up 1-2%
of the broken crockery in the settlement at Usatovo, perhaps carried in
by longboat rowers engaged in coastal trade down to Bulgaria. But these
Cernavoda vessels never were offered as gifts in Usatovo graves. Whole
imported late Maikop-Novosvobodnaya pots were included as grave gifts
in the two central graves in kurgans 12 and 13 in kurgan cemetery I at
Usatovo, two of the largest kurgans; but Maikop pottery never occurred in
the settlement. Imported Maikop pots had a very different social meaning
from Cernavoda pots.

Trade might have linked Usatovo to the emerging Aegean maritime
chiefdoms of the EBI period, including Troy I. A white glass bead re-
covered from Usatovo kurgan cemetery II, kurgan 2, grave, 1 is the oldest
known glass in the Black Sea region and perhaps in the ancient world.
Glaze, the simplest form of glass, was applied to ceramics by about
4500-4000 BCE in northern Mesopotamia and Egypt. Glazes were
made by mixing powdered quartz sand, lime, and either soda or ash and
then heating the mixture to about 900°C, when it fused into a viscous
state and could be dipped or poured. Faience beads were made of the same
materials, molded into bead shapes, and glazed, beginning about the
same time. But translucent glass, which required a higher temperature,
has not been securely dated before the fifth dynasty of Egypt, or before
2450 BCE. The Usatovo bead and two others from Tripolye C2 Sofievka
on the middle Dnieper are probably four hundred to seven hundred years
older than that, equivalent to the first dynasty or the late Pre-Dynastic
period. The Tripolye culture had no glazed ceramics or faience, so this
vitreous technology was exotic. Almost certainly the Usatovo and Sofievka

Western Indo-European Languages J55

glass beads were made somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean and
imported. Another Tripolye C 2 cemetery near Sofievka at Zavalovka,
radiocarbon dated 2900-2800 BCE and similar to Sofievka in grave
types and pottery, contained beads made of amber from the Baltic, per-
haps the earliest expression of the exchange of northern amber for Medi-
terranean luxuries. 14

In addition, two of the central dagger graves (k. 1 and 3) at Usatovo and
an Usatovo grave at Sukleya on the lower Dniester contained daggers with
rivet holes for the handle, cast in bivalve molds with a midrib on the blade,
[see figure 14.4, top]. This kind of blade appeared also in Anatolia at Troy
II and contemporary sites in Greece and Crete (David Stronach s Type 4
daggers). Like the glass, the Usatovo examples seem older than the Ae-
gean ones — they should date to the equivalent of Troy I. But, in this case,
the type might well have been locally invented in southeastern Europe
and spread to the Aegean. Daggers with rivet holes but with a simpler
lenticular-sectioned blade (without a midrib) certainly were made locally
across southeastern Europe. They appeared in at least seven other Usatovo-
culture graves, in graves at Sofievka on the middle Dnieper, and in Cot-
sofeni sites in the lower Danube valley, radiocarbon dated just before and
after 3000 BCE [see figure 14.4, middle]. Regardless of the direction of
borrowing, the shared riveted dagger types of Usatovo and the Aegean
point to long-distance contacts between the two regions, perhaps in oared
longboats. 15

Patrons and Clients: Graves of the Warrior Chiefs at Usatovo

Usatovo kurgan cemetery I was quite near the Usatovo settlement (see
figure 14.2). It originally contained about twenty kurgans. Fifteen were
excavated between 1921 and 1973. They were complex constructions. Each
kurgan had an earth core built up inside a stone cromlech made of large
rectangular stones laid horizontally. All the cromlechs were covered b\
earth when the kurgans were enlarged; whether this was part of the origi-
nal funeral or an entirely unconnected later event is unknown. The central
grave was a deep shaft (up to 2 m deep) dug in the center of the cromlech
circle, and in most kurgans it was accompanied by several (1-3) other
graves also located inside the cromlech circle, in shallow pits covered by
stone lids. At least five kurgans in cemetery I (3, 9, 11, 13, 14) were guarded
by standing stone stelae on the southwestern sector of the mound. One
stela (k. 13) was shaped at its top into a head, making an anthropomorphic

jj 6 Chapter 14

shape, like many contemporary Yamnaya stelae in the South Bug-Dnieper
steppes (see figure 13.11). Kurgan 3 (31 m in diameter) had two stelae
standing side by side. The larger one (1.1 m tall) was inscribed with the
images of a man, a deer, and three horses; the smaller one had just one
horse. Kurgan 11 (40 m in diameter, the largest at Usatovo) covered a
cromlech circle and inner mound 26 m in diameter surfaced with eighty-
five hundred stones. On its southwest border were three stelae, one 2.7 m
tall (!) with inscribed images of either dogs or horses. The central grave
was robbed.

Only adult men were buried in the central graves of kurgan cemetery I,
in a contracted position on the left side oriented east-northeast. Only the
central graves and the peripheral graves on the southwestern sector con-
tained red ochre. Seven of the fifteen central graves (k. 1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12,
and 14) had arsenical bronze dagger blades with two to four rivet holes for
the handle. No other graves at Usatovo contained daggers (figure 14.4).
Bronze daggers emerged as new symbols of status here and in the graves
of the Yamnaya horizon at this time, but Yamnaya daggers had long tangs
for the handle, like Novosvobodnaya daggers and unlike the Usatovo and
Sofievka daggers with rivet holes for the handle. The central graves at
Usatovo also contained fine Tripolye pots, arsenical bronze awls, flat axes,
two Novosvobodnaya-style chisels, adzes, silver rings and spiral twists,
flint microlithic blades, and flint hollow-based arrowheads. Bronze weap-
ons and tools appeared only in the central graves.

Kurgan cemetery II was about 400 m away from kurgan cemetery I. It
originally contained probably ten kurgans, most of them smaller than
those in kurgan cemetery I; three were excavated. They yielded no dag-
gers, no weapons, only small metal objects (awls, rings), and only a few
fine painted Tripolye ceramic vessels. Six individuals had designs painted
on their skulls with red ochre (figure 14.5). Three of these were men who
had been killed by hammer blows to the head. Hammer wounds did not
appear in kurgan cemetery I. Kurgan cemetery II was used for a distinct
social group or status, perhaps warriors. But similar red designs were
painted on the head of one male in kurgan cemetery I, in a peripheral
grave under kurgan 12, grave 2, in the southwestern sector; similar de-
signs were painted on the skulls of some Yamnaya graves at the Popilnaya
kurgan cemetery on the South Bug. 16

The flat graves at Usatovo were shallow pits covered by large flat stones,
usually containing a body in a contracted position on the left side, oriented
east or northeast. The peripheral graves under the kurgans had the same
form as flat graves, and two cemeteries contained just flat graves, without

Yamnaya

Figure 14.4 Daggers of the EBA, 3300-2800 BCE. Top row : Usatovo kurgan
cemetery I, kurgan 3, central grave, with midrib dagger; kurgan 1, midrib dag-
ger; Sukleya kurgan, midrib dagger; kurgan 9, lenticular-sectioned dagger;
kurgan 6, lenticular-sectioned dagger. Middle row left : Werteba Cave, upper
Dniester, riveted dagger; Cucuteni B, Moldova, midrib dagger; Werteba Cave,
bone dagger carved in the shape of a metal dagger. Middle row right , Cotsofeni
daggers from the lower Danube valley. Bottom row, Yamnaya tanged daggers
from the North Pontic steppes. After Anthony 1996; and Nechitailo 1991.

35 $ Chapter 14

Western Indo-European Languages 359

Usatovo (1-5) and Mayaki (6) painted skulls

Figure 14.5 Skulls painted with red ochre designs from the Usatovo and
Mayaki cemeteries. Number 3 was killed by the hammer wound in the
forehead. After Zin’kovskii and Petrenko 1987.

kurgans (thirty-six graves in flat cemetery I; thirty graves in flat cemetery
II). Whereas just seven of the fifty-one graves (14%) in the kurgan ceme-
teries contained children, and two of these were buried with adults, twelve
of the thirty-six graves (33%) in flat cemetery I contained children. Most
of the adults in the flat graves were males, with a few old females. Each
grave had from one to five pottery vessels but no metal, and only 4% of the
pottery was fine painted ware. They did have ceramic female figurines

(principally in childrens graves), flint tools, and projectile points, and fif-
teen skulls were painted in the same red ochre designs as those in the
kurgan graves, but none had hammer wounds.

Kurgan cemetery I was reserved for leaders who displayed arsenical
bronze riveted daggers and axes and wore silver rings but suffered no ham-
mer wounds, perhaps patrons. Kurgan cemetery II honored old men, old
women, young men, and children who did not have bronze daggers or
metal weapons of any kind but sometimes died of hammer wounds to the
head, perhaps those who died in battle and their close kin. The flat ceme-
teries contained many children, a few women, and old men who had plain
pots and no daggers. All were connected to one another, and to external
Yamnaya groups, by linear red designs painted on some skulls. The social
organization of Usatovo has been interpreted as a male-centered military
aristocracy, but it could also be read as remarkably like the tripartite social
system suggested by Dumezil for the speakers of Proto-Indo-European,
with priest-patrons (kurgan cemetery I), warriors (kurgan cemetery II),
and ordinary producers (flat graves).

The Ancestor of English: The Origin and Spread of the Usatovo Dialect

The Usatovo culture was exclusively a steppe culture, and it appeared si-
multaneously with the rapid expansion of the Yamnaya horizon across the
steppes, after the permanent dissolution of many Tripolye towns near the
steppe border. Usatovo is often interpreted as a Tripolye population that
migrated into the steppes, but Tripolye farmers had never done this dur-
ing the previous two thousand years, and in neighboring valleys (the lower
Siret, lower Prut, the entire South Bug valley, the Ros*) they were retreat-
ing from the steppe border, not advancing across it. The funeral customs of
Usatovo were starkly hierarchical, with a typical steppe kurgan ritual re-
served for the elite. Although Usatovo ceramics were almost entirely bor-
rowed from and made by Tripolye potters, even here there were similarities
with Yamnaya ceramics in some cord-impressed ornament on the coarse
wares. Usatovo is not counted as a part of the Yamnaya horizon because of
its close integration with the Tripolye culture, but it appeared at the same
time as the Yamnaya horizon, in the steppes, with kurgan funeral rituals
that repeated many old steppe customs; sacrifices and broken pottery also
were placed on the southwestern side of the kurgan in Yamnaya and even
Afanasievo graves. The painted skulls were also repeated in Yamnaya
graves. Usatovo probably began with steppe clans connected with the early

j6o Chapter 14

Yamnaya horizon who were able to impose a patron-client relationship
on Tripolye farming villages because of the protection that client status
offered in a time of great insecurity. The pastoral patrons quickly became
closely integrated with the farmers.

Tripolye clients of the Usatovo chiefs could have been the agents
through which the Usatovo language spread northward into central Eu-
rope. After a few generations of clientage, the people of the upper Dnies-
ter might have wanted to acquire their own clients. Nested hierarchies
in which clients are themselves patrons of other clients are characteristic
of the growth of patron-client systems. The archaeological evidence for
some kind of northward spread of people or political relationships con-
sists of pottery exchanges between Tripolye sites on the upper Dniester
and late TRB (Trichterbecker or Funnel-Beaker culture) sites in south-
eastern Poland. Substantial quantities of fine painted Tripolye C 2 pot-
tery of the Brynzeny III type occurred in southern Polish settlements of
the late TRB culture dated 3000-2800 BCE, importantly at Grodek
Nadbuzny and Zimne, and late TRB pots were imported into the Tri-
polye C2 sites of Zhvanets and Brynzeny III. 1, Zhvanets was a produc-
tion center for fine Tripolye pottery, with seven large two-chambered
kilns, a possible source of local economic and political prestige. Conflict
accompanied or alternated with exchange, since both the Polish sites and
the Tripolye C2 sites closest to southeastern Poland were heavily forti-
fied. The Tripolye C2 settlement of Kosteshti IV had a stone wall 6 m
wide and a fortification ditch 5 m wide, and Zhvanets had three lines of
fortification walls faced with stone, and both were located on high prom-
ontories. 18 Tripolye C2 community leaders whose parents had already
adopted the Usatovo language could have attempted to extend to the late
TRB communities of southern Poland the same kind of patron-client
relationships that the Usatovo chiefs had offered them, an extension that
might well have been encouraged or even backed up by paramount Usatovo
chiefs.

If I had to hazard a guess I would say that this was how the Proto-Indo-
European dialects that would ultimately form the root of Pre-Germanic
first became established in central Europe: they spread up the Dniester
from the Usatovo culture through a nested series of patrons and clients,
and eventually were spoken in some of the late TRB communities be-
tween the Dniester and the Vistula. These late TRB communities later
evolved into early Corded Ware communities, and it was the Corded Ware
horizon (see below) that provided the medium through which the Pre-
Germanic dialects spread over a wider area.

Western Indo-European Languages j6i

The Yamnaya Migration up the Danube Valley

About 3100 BCE, during the initial rapid spread of the Yamnaya horizon
across the Pontic-Caspian steppes, and while the Usatovo culture was still
in its early phase, Yamnaya herders began to move through the steppes
past Usatovo and into the lower Danube valley. The initial groups were
followed by a regular stream of people that continued for perhaps three
hundred years, between 3100 and 2800 BCE. 19 The passage through the
Usatovo chiefdoms probably was managed through guest-host relation-
ships. The migrants did not claim any Usatovo territory — at least they did
not create their own cemeteries there. Instead, they kept going into the
Danube valley, a minimum distance of 600-800 km from where they be-
gan in the steppes east of Usatovo — in the South Bug valley and farther
east. The largest number of Yamnaya migrants ended up in eastern Hun-
gary, an amazing distance (800-1,300 km depending on the route taken).
This was a major, sustained population movement, and, like all such move-
ments, it must have been preceded by scouts who collected information
while on some other kind of business, possibly horse trading. The scouts
knew just a few areas, and these became the targets of the migrants. 20

The Yamnaya migrations into the Danube valley were targeted toward at
least five specific destinations (see figure 14.1). One cluster of Yamnaya kur-
gan cemeteries, probably the earliest, appeared on the elevated plain north-
west of Varna bay in Bulgaria (kurgan cemeteries at Plachidol, Madara, and
other nearby places). This cluster overlooked the fortified coastal settlement
at Ezerovo, an important local Early Bronze Age center. The second cluster
of kurgan cemeteries appeared in the Balkan uplands 200 km to the south-
west (the Kovachevo and Troyanovo cemeteries). They overlooked a fertile
plain between the Balkan peaks and the Maritsa River, where many old tells
such as Ezero and Mihailich had just been reoccupied and fortified. The
third target was 300 km farther up the Danube valley in northwestern Bul-
garia (Tarnava), on low ridges overlooking the broad plain of the Danube.
These three widely separated clusters in Bulgaria contained at least seventeen
Yamnaya cemeteries, each with five to twenty kurgans. Across the Danube
and just 100 km west of the northwestern Bulgarian cluster, a larger group
of kurgan cemeteries appeared in southwestern Romania, where at least a
hundred Yamnaya kurgans dotted the low plains overlooking the Danube
around Rast in southern Oltenia, south of Craiova. The Tarnava and Rast
kurgans were in the same terrain and can be counted as one group, separated
by the Danube River (and a modern international border).

j 62 Chapter 14

Pushing westward through Cotsofeni-culture territory, Yamnaya mi-
grants found their way over the mountains around the Iron Gates, where
the Danube sweeps through a long, steep set of gorges, and into the wide
plains on the Serbian side. A few kurgan groups were erected in a fourth
cluster west of the Iron Gates in the plains of northern Serbia (Jabuka).
Finally, the fifth and largest group of kurgans appeared in the eastern
Hungarian plains north of the Koros and east of the Tisza rivers. 21 Tie
number of kurgans raised in the east Hungarian cluster is unknown, but
Ecsedy estimated at least three thousand, spread over about 6000-8000
km 2 . Archaeologists have mapped forty-five Yamnaya cemeteries, each of
which contained five to thirty-five kurgans. One kurgan at Ketegyhaza
was built on top of the remains of a Cernavoda III settlement. Tie east
Hungarian Yamnaya population seems to have been the largest that ac-
cumulated in any of the five target areas. Some of them wore leather caps,
silver temple rings, and dog-canine-tooth necklaces in their graves.

The first three clusters near Varna, Ezero, and the Cotsofeni territory
seem to have been chosen for their proximity to settled areas, perhaps by
ambitious men seeking clients, whereas the last two clusters seem to have
been chosen for their pastures, perhaps by others who wanted to increase
their herds. In all places the Yamnaya funeral ritual was similar, and it was
not native but intrusive. Kurgans were 15-60 m in diameter. Tie grave pit
floors often had traces of organic mats, some painted with designs, as in
the steppes (figure 14.6). Tie central graves contained an adult (80% are
males in Bulgaria) buried supine with raised knees (some were contracted
on the side), with the head oriented toward the west (or, in Bulgaria,
sometimes to the south). Most had Proto-Europoid skull-face shapes, like
the predominant element in the Pontic steppe Yamnaya population. Most
graves contained no grave goods. A few contained a flint tool, beads of
pierced dog teeth, or a temple ring with one and a half twists of copper,
silver, or gold. In Hungary a lump of red ochre was placed near the head;
in Romania and Bulgaria, in addition to a lump placed near the head, red
ochre covered the floor or stained the skull, feet, legs, and hands. At Ke-
tegyhaza, where there was no local source of hematite from which to make
red ochre, a lump of clay was painted red to imitate true ochre, a clear in-
dication of a cult practice imported from a region with different minerals.
One grave at Gurbane§ti in Romania contained a clay vessel with carbon-
ized hemp seeds, the earliest evidence for the burning of Cannabis. Sherrat
suggested that Cannabis smoking was introduced to the Danube valley by
the Yamnaya immigrants. In northeast Bulgaria at Plachidol, one Yam-
naya grave (k. 1, gr. 1) had four wooden wagon wheels placed at the corners

Western Indo-European Languages j6j

HORTOBAGY-ARKUS, HUNGARY

| D 0

black stripes red painting mat remains

Figure 14.6 Kurgan graves and ceramics from Bulgaria and eastern Hungary
associated with the Yamnaya migration about 3000 BCE. The graves under
Tarnava kurgan 1 in northwestern Bulgaria contained principally Cotsofeni
pottery, but one grave under kurgan 2 contained a typical Yamnaya beaker.
After Ecsedy 1979; Panaiotov 1989; and Sherratt 1986.

just as in many wagon graves in the steppes (figure 14.6). Cemeteries in
this cluster near Varna contained anthropomorphic stone stelae like the
Yamnaya and Kemi-Oba stelae in the steppes.

The source of the Yamnaya migration is commonly said to have been in
the lower Dniester steppes, where Yamnaya graves also were consistently
oriented to the west. But the lower Dniester steppes were occupied by the
Usatovo culture between 3100 and 2800 BCE. Yamnaya graves in the
Dniester steppes are consistently stratified above Usatovo graves, and most
of them are radiocarbon dated between 2800 and 2400 BCE, so most of
them postdated the Danube valley migration. Tie Dniester variant of
Yamnaya might instead represent a return migration from the Danube val-
ley back into the steppes, since almost all significant migration streams

J64 Chapter 14

produce a flowback of return migration. The Yamnaya wagon graves
(Kholmskoe, Vishnevoe, and others) located in the steppes just north of
the Danube delta are stratified above Usatovo graves, so probably were
made later than the Yamnaya wagon grave in Bulgaria at Plachidol. The
Danube valley migration probably originated east of the Usatovo area, in
the steppes around the South Bug, Ingul, and Dnieper valleys. Western-
oriented Yamnaya graves are found as a minor variant in Yamnaya ceme-
teries in the Dnieper-South Bug region. The oldest dated Yamnaya wagon
grave (ca. 3000 BCE) at Bal ki (k. 1 gr. 57) on the lower Dnieper was
oriented to the west. 22

What started this movement? A popular candidate has been a shortage
of pasture in the steppes, but I find it hard to believe that there was any
absolute shortage of pasture during the initial expansion of a new wagon-
based economy. If the migration into the Danube valley began with raid-
ing that then developed into a migration, we have to ask what caused the
raiding. In the discussion of the causes of steppe warfare, in chapter 11,

I mentioned the Proto-Indo-European Trito myth, which legitimized the
cattle raid; the likelihood that competition between high-status families
would lead to escalating bride-prices calculated in livestock, which might
create a consumer shortage of animals and pastures in places where no ab-
solute shortage existed; and the Proto-Indo-European initiation ritual
that sent all young men out raiding.

The institution of the Mannerbunde or korios, the warrior brotherhood of
young men bound by oath to one another and to their ancestors during a
ritually mandated raid, has been reconstructed as a central part of Proto-
Indo-European initiation rituals. 23 One material trait linked to these cer-
emonies was the dog or wolf; the young initiates were symbolized by the
dog or wolf and in some Indo-European traditions wore dog or wolfskins
during their initiation. The canine teeth of dogs were frequently worn as
pendants in Yamnaya graves in the western Pontic steppes, particularly in
the Ingul valley, one probable region of origin for the Yamnaya migra-
tion. 24 A second material trait linked to the korios was the belt. The korios
raiders wore a belt and little else (like the warrior figures in some later
Germanic and Celtic art, e.g., the Anglo-Saxon Finglesham belt buckle).
The initiates on a raid wore two belts, their leader one, symbolizing that
the leader was bound by a single oath to the god of war/ancestors, and the
initiates were double-bound to the god/ancestors and to the leader. Stone
anthropomorphic stelae were erected over hundreds of Yamnaya graves
between the Ingul and the South Bug valleys, in the same region where

Western Indo-European Languages j6$

dog-canine pendants were common. The most common clothing element
carved or painted on the stelae was a belt, often with an axe or a pair of
sandals attached to it. Usually it was a single belt, perhaps symbolizing the
leader of a raid. That stone stelae with belts were erected also by the Yam-
naya migrants in Bulgaria near Plachidol provides another link between
the migrants and the symbolism of the korios raid. 25

There must also have been other pulls, positive rumors about opportunities
in the Danube valley, because the migrants did not just raid but decided to
live in the target region. These attractions are difficult to identify now, al-
though the opportunity to acquire clients might have been a powerful pull.

Language Shift and the Yamnaya Migration

The Yamnaya migration occurred at a time of great fluidity and change
throughout southeastern Europe. In Bulgaria, the tells in the upland plains
of the Balkans at Ezero, Yunatsite, and Dubene-Sarovka were reoccupied
about 3300-3200 BCE at the beginning of the Early Bronze Age (EBI)
after almost a millennium of abandonment. The reoccupied tell settlements
were fortified with substantial stone walls or ditches and palisades. One
target of the Yamnaya migration was precisely this region. Yamnaya kur-
gan cemeteries could be seen for many miles; visually, they dominated the
landscapes around them. In contrast, local cemeteries in the lower Danube
valley and the Balkans, like the EBI cemetery at the Bereket tell settlement
near Stara Zagora, usually had no visible surface monuments. 26

A series of new artifact types diffused very widely across the lower and
middle Danube valleys in connection with the Yamnaya migration. Concave-
based arrowheads similar to steppe arrowheads appeared in the newly oc-
cupied tell sites in Bulgaria (Ezero) and in Aegean Macedonia (Dikili-Tash
IIIB). These possibly were a sign of warfare with intrusive Yamnaya raiding
groups. A new ceramic style spread across the entire middle and lower
Danube, including the Morava and Struma valleys leading to Greece and
the Aegean, and in Aegean Macedonia. The defining trait of this style was
cord-impressed pottery encrusted with white paint. 27 White-encrusted,
cord-impressed pottery appeared also in the Yamnaya graves. The Yamnaya
immigrants could, perhaps, have played a role in joining one region to an-
other and helping to spread this new style. But the pottery styles they
spread were not their own. The Yamnaya immigrants usually deposited no
pottery in their graves, and, when they did, they borrowed local ceramic
styles, so their ceramic footprint is almost invisible.

j66 Chapter 14

Many Yamnaya kurgans in the lower Danube valley contained Cotsofeni
ceramic vessels. The Cotsofeni culture evolved in mountain refuges in west-
ern Romania and Transylvania beginning about 3500 BCE, probably from
Old European roots. Cotsofeni settlements were small agricultural hamlets
of a few houses. Their owners cremated their dead and buried the ashes in
flat graves, some of which contained riveted daggers like Usatovo daggers. 28
When Yamnaya herders reached the plains around Craiova, they probably
realized that control over this region was the key to movement up and down
the Danube valley through the mountain passes around the Iron Gates.
They established alliances or patron-client contracts with the leaders of the
Cotsofeni communities, through which they obtained Cotsofeni pottery
(and probably other less visible Cotsofeni products), as Usatovo patrons ob-
tained Tripolye pottery. Cotsofeni pottery then was carried into other regions
by Yamnaya people. A Cotsofeni vessel was found in a Yamnaya kurgan as
far afield as Tarakliya, Moldova, probably in the grave of a returned migrant.
In northwestern Bulgaria, kurgan 1 at Tarnava (figure 14.6) contained an
unusual concentration of six Cotsofeni pots in six Yamnaya graves. 29 Most
of the Yamnaya kurgans in Bulgaria contained no ceramics, but, when they
did, they were often Cotsofeni ceramics.

The situation of the Yamnaya chiefs might have been similar to that
described by Barth in his account of the Yusufai Pathan invasion of the
Swat valley in Pakistan in the sixteenth century. The invader, “faced with
the sea of politically undifferentiated villagers proceeds to organize a cen-
tral island of authority, and from this island he attempts to exercise author-
ity over the surrounding sea. Other landowners establish similar islands,
some with overlapping spheres of influence, others having unadministered
gaps between them.” 30 The mechanism through which the immigrant chief
made himself indispensable to the villagers and tied them to him was the
creation of a contract in which he guaranteed protection, hospitality, and
the recognition of the villagers’ rights to agricultural production in ex-
change for their loyalty, service, and best land. Yamnaya herding groups
needed more land for pastures than did farming groups of equal popula-
tion, and this could have provided a rationale for the Yamnaya people to
claim use-rights over most of the available pasture lands and the migra-
tion routes that linked them, eventually creating a web of landownership
that covered much of southeastern Europe. The reestablishment of tell
settlements in the Balkans might have been part of a newly bifurcated
economy in which farmers settled on fortified tells and increased grain
production in response to reductions in their pastures, taken by their Yam-
naya patrons.

Western Indo-European Languages j6y

Tie widely separated pockets of Yamnaya settlement in the lower Danube
valley and the Balkans established speakers of late Proto-Indo-European di-
alects in scattered islands where, if they remained isolated from one another,
they could have differentiated over centuries into various Indo-European
languages. The many thousands of Yamnaya kurgans in eastern Hungary
suggest a more continuous occupation of the landscape by a larger population
of immigrants, one that could have acquired power and prestige partly just
through its numerical weight. This regional group could have spawned both
pre-Italic and pre-Celtic. Bell Beaker sites of the Csepel type around Buda-
pest, west of the Yamnaya settlement region, are dated about 2800-2600
BCE. Tiey could have been a bridge between Yamnaya on their east and
Austria/Southern Germany to their west, through which Yamnaya dialects
spread from Hungary into Austria and Bavaria, where they later developed
into Proto-Celtic. 31 Pre-Italic could have developed among the dialects
that remained in Hungary, ultimately spreading into Italy through the
Urnfield and Villanovan cultures. Eric Hamp and others have revived the
argument that Italic and Celtic shared a common parent, so a single migra-
tion stream could have contained dialects that later were ancestral to both. 32
Archaeologically, however, the Yamnaya immigrants here, as elsewhere,
left no lasting material impression except their kurgans.

Yamnaya Contacts with the Corded Ware Horizon

The Corded Ware horizon is often invoked as the archaeological mani-
festation of the cultures that introduced the northern Indo-European
languages to Europe: Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic. The Corded Ware ho-
rizon spread across most of northern Europe, from Ukraine to Belgium,
after 3000 BCE, with the initial rapid spread happening mainly between
2900 and 2700 BCE. The defining traits of the Corded Ware horizon were
a pastoral, mobile economy that resulted in the near disappearance of set-
tlement sites (much like Yamnaya in the steppes), the almost universal
adoption of funeral rituals involving single graves under mounds (like
Yamnaya), the diffusion of stone hammer-axes probably derived from
Polish TRB styles, and the spread of a drinking culture linked to particu-
lar kinds of cord-decorated cups and beakers, many of which had local
stylistic prototypes in variants of TRB ceramics. The material culture of
the Corded Ware horizon was mostly native to northern Europe, but the
underlying behaviors were very similar to those of the Yamnaya horizon —
the broad adoption of a herding economy based on mobility (using ox-
drawn wagons and horses), and a corresponding rise in the ritual prestige

j68 Chapter 14

and value of livestock. 33 The economy and political structure of the Corded
Ware horizon certainly was influenced by what had emerged earlier in
the steppes, and, as I just argued, some Corded Ware groups in south-
eastern Poland might have evolved from Indo-European-speaking late
TRB societies through connections with Usatovo and late Tripolye. The
Corded Ware horizon established the material foundation for the evolu-
tion of most of the Bronze Age cultures of the northern European plain,
so most discussions of Germanic, Baltic, or Slavic origins look back to
the Corded Ware horizon.

The Yamnaya and Corded Ware horizons bordered each other in the hills
between Lvov and Ivano-Frankovsk, Ukraine, in the upper Dniester pied-
mont around 2800-2600 BCE (see figure 14.1). At that time early Corded
Ware cemeteries were confined to the uppermost headwaters of the Dnies-
ter west of Lvov, the same territory that had earlier been occupied by the late
TRB communities infiltrated by late Tripolye groups. If Corded Ware soci-
eties in this region evolved from local late TRB origins, as many believe,
they might already have spoken an Indo-European language. Between 2700
and 2600 BCE Corded Ware and late Yamnaya herders met each other on
the upper Dniester over cups of mead or beer. 34 This meeting was another
opportunity for language shift, and it is possible that Pre-Germanic dialects
either originated here or were enriched by this additional contact.

The wide-ranging pattern of interaction that the Corded Ware horizon
inaugurated across northern Europe provided an optimal medium for
language spread. Late Proto-Indo-European languages penetrated the
eastern end of this medium, either through the incorporation of Indo-
European dialects in the TRB base population before the Corded Ware
horizon evolved, or through Corded Ware-Yamnaya contacts later, or
both. Indo-European speech probably was emulated because the chiefs
who spoke it had larger herds of cattle and sheep and more horses than
could be raised in northern Europe, and they had a politico-religious cul-
ture already adapted to territorial expansion. The dialects that were an-
cestral to Germanic probably were initially adopted in a small territory
between the Dniester and the Vistula and then spread slowly. As we will
see in the next chapter, Slavic and Baltic probably evolved from dialects
spoken on the middle Dnieper. 35

The Origins of Greek

The only major post-Anatolian branch that is difficult to derive from the
steppes is Greek. One reason for this is chronological: Pre-Greek probably

Western Indo-European Languages 369

split away from a later set of developing Indo-European dialects and lan-
guages, not from Proto-Indo-European itself. Greek shared traits with
Armenian and Phrygian, both of which probably descended from lan-
guages spoken in southeastern Europe before 1200 BCE, so Greek shared
a common background with some southeastern European languages that
might have evolved from the speech of the Yamnaya immigrants in Bul-
garia. As noted in chapter 3, Pre-Greek also shared many traits with
pre-Indo-Iranian. This linguistic evidence suggests that Pre-Greek should
have been spoken on the eastern border of southeastern Europe, where it
could have shared some traits with Pre-Armenian and Pre-Phrygian on
the west and pre-Indo-Iranian on the east. The early western Catacomb
culture would fit these requirements (see figure 15.5), as it was in touch
with southeastern Europe on one side and with the developing Indo-Iranian
world of the east on the other. But it is impossible, as far as I know, to
identify a Catacomb-culture migration that moved directly from the west-
ern steppes into Greece.

A number of artifact types and customs connect the Mycenaean Shaft
Grave princes, the first definite Greek speakers at about 1650 BCE, with
steppe or southeastern European cultures. These parallels included specific
types of cheekpieces for chariot horses, specific types of socketed spear-
heads, and even the custom of making masks for the dead, which was com-
mon on the Ingul River during the late Catacomb culture, between about
2500 and 2000 BCE. It is very difficult, however, to define the specific
source of the migration stream that brought the Shaft Grave princes into
Greece. The people who imported Greek or Proto-Greek to Greece might
have moved several times, perhaps by sea, from the western Pontic steppes
to southeastern Europe to western Anatolia to Greece, making their trail
hard to find. The EHII/III transition about 2400-2200 BCE has long
been seen as a time of radical change in Greece when new people might
have arrived, but the resolution of this problem is outside the scope of this
book. 36

Conclusion: The Early Western Indo-European
Languages Disperse

There was no Indo-European invasion of Europe. The spread of the Usa-
tovo dialect up the Dniester valley, if it happened as I have suggested, was
quite different from the Yamnaya migration into the Danube valley. But
even that migration was not a coordinated military invasion. Instead, a suc-
cession of Pontic steppe tribal segments fissioned from their home clans

jyo Chapter 14

and moved toward what they perceived as places with good pastures and
opportunities for acquiring clients. The migrating Yamnaya chiefs then
organized islands of authority and used their ritual and political institu-
tions to establish control over the lands they appropriated for their herds,
which required granting legal status to the local populations nearby, under
patron-client contracts. Western Indo-European languages might well have
remained confined to scattered islands across eastern and central Europe
until after 2000 BCE, as Mallory has suggested. 3 ' Nevertheless, the move-
ments into the East Carpathians and up the Danube valley occurred in the
right sequence, at the right time, and in the right directions to be connected
with the detachment of Pre-Italic, Pre-Celtic, and Pre-Germanic — the
branch that ultimately gave birth to English.

Chapter Fifteen

Chariot Warriors of the Northern Steppes

The publication of the book Sintashta in 1992 (in Russian) opened a new era
in steppe archaeology. 1 Sintashta was a settlement east of the Ural Moun-
tains in the northern steppes. The settlement and the cemeteries around it
had been excavated by various archaeologists between 1972 and 1987. But
only after 1992 did the significance of the site begin to become clear.
Sintashta was a fortified circular town 140 m in diameter, surrounded by a
timber-reinforced earthen wall with timber gate towers (figure 15.1). Out-
side the wall was a V-shaped ditch as deep as a mans shoulders. The
Sintashta River, a western tributary of the upper Tobol, had washed away
half of it, but the ruins of thirty-one houses remained. The original town
probably contained fifty or sixty. Fortified strongholds like this were unpre-
cedented in the steppes. A few smaller fortified settlements had appeared
west of the Don (Mikhailovka, for example) during the Yamnaya period.
But the walls, gates, and houses of Sintashta were much more substantial
than at any earlier fortified site in the steppes. And inside each and every
house were the remains of metallurgical activity: slag, ovens, hearths, and
copper. Sintashta was a fortified metallurgical industrial center.

Outside the settlement were five funerary complexes that produced spec-
tacular finds (figure 15.2). The most surprising discoveries were the re-
mains of chariots, which radiocarbon dates showed were the oldest chariots
known anywhere. They came from a cemetery of forty rectangular grave
pits without an obvious kurgan labeled SM for Sintashta mogila , or Sintashta
cemetery. The other four mortuary complexes were a mid-size kurgan (SI,
for Sintashta /), 32 m in diameter and only 1 m high, that covered sixteen
graves; a second flat or non-kurgan cemetery (SII) with ten graves; a second
small kurgan (Sill), 16 m in diameter, that covered a single grave contain-
ing the partial remains of five individuals; and finally a huge kurgan, 85 m
in diameter and 4.5 m high (SB, for Sintashta bolshoi kurgan) } built over a
central grave (robbed in antiquity) constructed of logs and sod on the

37 1

3 J 2 Chapter ij

Figure 15.1 The Sintashta settlement: rectangular houses arranged in a circle
within a timber-reinforced earthen wall, with excavators' reconstruction of
south gate tower and outer defense wall. After Gening, Zdanovich, and
Gening 1992, figures 7 and 12.

original ground surface. The southern skirt of the SB kurgan covered, and
so was later than, the northern edge of the SM cemetery, although the ra-
diocarbon dates suggest that SM was only slightly older than SB. The forty
SM graves contained astounding sacrifices that included whole horses, up
to eight in and on a single grave (gr. 5), with bone disc-shaped cheekpieces,
chariots with spoked wheels, copper and arsenical bronze axes and daggers,
flint and bone projectile points, arsenical bronze socketed spearheads, pol-
ished stone mace heads, many ceramic pots, and a few small silver and gold
ornaments (figure 15.3). What was impressive in these graves was weap-
onry, vehicles, and animal sacrifices, not crowns or jewelry.

Chariot Warriors jyj

Figure 15.2 The Sintashta settlement landscape, with associated cemeteries,
and detail of the SM cemetery. After Gening, Zdanovich, and Gening 1992,
figures 2 and 42.

Figure 15.3 Sintashta SM cemetery, grave 30, with chariot wheel impres-
sions, skulls and lower leg bones of horse team, cheekpieces for bits, and
weapons. After Gening, Zdanovich, and Gening, figures 111, 113, and 114.

The radiocarbon dates for both the cemeteries and the settlement at
Sintashta were worryingly diverse, from about 2800-2700 BCE (4200 + 100
BP), for wood from grave 11 in the SM cemetery, to about 1800-1600
BCE (3340+ 60BP), for wood from grave 5 in the SII cemetery. Probably
there was an older Poltavka component at Sintashta, as later was found at
many other sites of the Sintashta type, accounting for the older dates.
Wood from the central grave of the large kurgan (SB) yielded consistent

Chariot Warriors 373

dates (3520-1-65, 3570-1-60, and 3720+120), or about 2100-1800 BCE.
The same age range was produced by radiocarbon dates from the similar
settlement at Arkaim, from several Sintashta cemeteries (Krivoe Ozero,
Kammeny Ambar), and from the closely related graves of the Potapovka
type in the middle Volga region (table 15.1).

The details of the funeral sacrifices at Sintashta showed startling paral-
lels with the sacrificial funeral rituals of the Rig Veda . The industrial scale
of metallurgical production suggested a new organization of steppe min-
ing and metallurgy and a greatly heightened demand for copper and
bronze. The substantial fortifications implied surprisingly large and deter-
mined attacking forces. And the appearance of Pontic-Caspian kurgan
rituals, vehicle burials, and weapon types in the steppes east of the Ural
River indicated that the Ural frontier had finally been erased.

After 1992 the flow of information about the Sintashta culture grew to
a torrent, almost all of it in Russian and much of it still undigested or ac-
tively debated as I write. 2 Sintashta was just one of more than twenty re-
lated fortified settlements located in a compact region of rolling steppes
between the upper Ural River on the west and the upper Tobol River on
the east, southeast of the Ural Mountains. The settlement at Arkaim, ex-
cavated by G. B. Zdanovich, was not damaged by erosion, and twenty-
seven of its fifty to sixty structures were exposed (figure 15.4). All the
houses at Arkaim contained metallurgical production facilities. It has
become a conference center and national historic monument. Sintashta
and Arkaim raised many intriguing questions. Why did these fortified
metal-producing towns appear in that place at that time? Why the heavy
fortifications — who were they afraid of? Was there an increased demand
for copper or just a new organization of copper working and mining or
both? Did the people who built these strongholds invent chariots? And
were they the original Aryans, the ancestors of the people who later com-
posed the Rig Veda and the Avesta ? 3

The End of the Forest Frontier: Corded Ware
Herders in the Forest

To understand the origins of the Sintashta culture we have to begin far to
the west. In what had been the Tripolye region between the Dniester and
Dnieper rivers, the interaction between Corded Ware, Globular Ampho-
rae, and Yamnaya populations between 2800 and 2600 BCE produced a
complicated checkerboard of regional cultures covering the rolling hills
and valleys of the forest-steppe zone (figure 15.5). To the south, in the

Jj6 Chapter /j

Table 15.1

Selected radiocarbon dates for the Sintashta-Arkaim (S) and Potapovka (P) cultures in the
south Ural steppes and middle Volga steppes.

Lab Number BP Date

Sintashta SB Big Kurgan (S)

Sample Source

C, K Calibrated Date

GIN-6186 3670 + 40 birch log

GIN-6187 3510140 “

GIN-6188 3510140

GIN-6189 3260140

2140-1970 BCE
1890-1740 BCE
1890-1740 BCE
1610-1450 BCE

Sintashta SM cemetery (S)

Ki~653 42001100 grave 11, wood

Ki-658 41001170 grave 39, wood

Ki-657 37601120 grave 28, wood

Ki-864 35601180 grave 19, wood

Ki-862 3360170 graveS, wood

K 2900-2620 BC

K 2900-2450 BC

C 2400-1970 BC

C 2200-1650 BCE

C, K 1740-1520 BC

Krivoe Ozero cemetery, kurgan 9, grave 1 (S)
AA-9874b 3740150 horse 1 bone

AA-9875a 3700 1 60 horse 2 bone

AA-9874a 3580150 horse 1 bone

AA-9875b 3525150 horse 2 bone

C, K 2270-2030 BC
2200-1970 BC
2030-1780 BC
1920-1750 BC

Kammeny Ambar 5 (S)
OxA- 12532 3604131

OxA- 12530 3572129

OxA-12533 3555131

OxA-12531 3549149

OxA- 12534 3529131

OxA- 12560 3521128

OxA- 12535 3498135

k2: grave 12, human bone
k2: grave 6, “

k2: grave 15,
k2: grave 8, “

k4: grave 3, “

k4: grave 1, “

k4: grave 15,

2020-1890 BCE
K 1950-1830 BCE
1950-1780 BCE
C, K 1950-1770 BCE
1920-1770 BCE
1890-1770 BCE
1880-1740 BCE

Utyevka cemetery VI (P)
AA-12568 37601100

OxA-4264 3585180

OxA-4306 3510180

OxA-4263 3470180

k6: grave 4, human bone
k6: grave 6, human bone
k6: grave 4, human bone
k6: grave 6, human bone

K 2340-1980 BC

2110-1770 BC
K 1940-1690 BC

K 1890-1680 BC

Potapovka cemetery I (P)

AA-12569 4180185 k5: grave 6, dog bone*

2890-2620 BC

Chariot Warriors jyy

Table 15.1 {continued')

lab Number

BP Date

Sample Source

C, K Calibrated Date

AA-47803

4153 ±59

k.3: grave 1, human bone*

2880-2620 BC

OxA-4265

3710180

k5: grave 13, human bone

2270-1960 BC

OxA-4266

3510180

k5: grave 3, human bone

1940-1690 BC

AA-47802

3536157

k.3: grave 1, horse skull*

1950-1770 BC

Other Potapovka cemeteries (P)

AA-53803

4081154

Kutuluk I, kl:l, human bone

2860-2490 BC

AA-53806

3752152

Grachevka II k5:3, human bone

2280-2030 BC

•See note 17

Graves that contained chariots are marked C; graves that contained studded disc cheekpieces are
marked K.

steppes, late Yamnaya and a few late Usatovo groups continued to erect
kurgan cemeteries. Some late Yamnaya groups penetrated northward into
the forest-steppe, up the Dniester, South Bug, and Dnieper valleys. East-
ern Carpathian groups making Globular Amphorae pottery moved from
the upper Dniester region around Lvov eastward into the forest-steppe
around Kiev, and then retreated back to the Dniester. Corded Ware groups
from southern Poland replaced them around Kiev. Under the influence of
this combined Globular Amphorae and Corded Ware expansion to the
east, the already complex mixture of Yamnaya-influenced Late Tripolye
people in the Middle Dnieper valley created the Middle Dnieper culture
in the forest-steppe region around Kiev. This was the first food-producing,
herding culture to push into the Russian forests north of Kiev. 4

The Middle Dnieper and Fatyanovo Cultures

The people of the Middle Dnieper culture carried stockbreeding econo-
mies (cattle, sheep, and pigs, depending on the region) north into the for-
est zone, up the Dnieper and Desna into what is now Belarus (figure
15.5). They followed marshes, open lakes, and riverine floodplains where
there were natural openings in the forest. These open places had grass and
reeds for the animals, and the rivers supplied plentiful fish. The earliest
Middle Dnieper sites are dated about 2800-2600 BCE; the latest ones
continued to about 1900-1800 BCE. 5 Early Middle Dnieper pottery
showed clear similarities with Carpathian and eastern Polish Corded

jy8 Chapter jj

Arkaim settlement and finds

Chariot Warriors jyp

'/';// <ty

BAL Aft.

SINTASHTA

POLrAVKA

fMIDDLE

DNIEPER

CONTACT'

sZONE^l

AZOV

CAUCASUS Mts,

) anube

0 100 200 300 400 500km

Figure 15.5 Culture groups of the Middle Bronze Age, 2800-2200 BCE

j8o Chapter /j

Ware pottery, and Middle Dnieper pots have been found in Corded Ware
graves near Grzeda Sokalska between the upper Dniester and the upper
Vistula. 6 Some late Sredni Stog or Yamnaya elements also appeared in
Middle Dnieper ceramics (figure 15.6). Middle Dnieper cemeteries con-
tained both kurgans and flat-graves, both inhumation burials and crema-
tions, with hollow-based flint arrowheads like those of the Yamnaya and
Catacomb cultures, large trapezoidal flint axes like Globular Amphorae,
and drilled stone “battle-axes” like those of the Corded Ware cultures.
The Middle Dnieper culture clearly emerged from a series of encounters
and exchanges between steppe and forest-steppe groups around Kiev, near
the strategic fords over the Dnieper. 7

A second culture, Fatyanovo, emerged at the northeastern edge of the Mid-
dle Dnieper culture. After the cattle herders moved out of the south-flowing
Dnieper drainage and into the north-flowing rivers such as the Oka that
coursed through the pine-oak-birch forests to the Upper Volga, they began
to make pottery in distinctive Fatyanovo forms. But Fatyanovo pottery still
showed mixed Corded Ware/Globular Amphorae traits, and the Fatya-
novo culture probably was derived from an early variant of the Middle
Dnieper culture. Ultimately Fatyanovo-type pottery, graves, and the cattle-
raising economy spread over almost the entire Upper Volga basin. In the
enormous western part of the Fatyanovo territory, from the Dvina to the
Oka, very few Fatyanovo settlements are known, but more than three hun-
dred large Fatyanovo flat-grave cemeteries, without kurgans, have been
found on hills overlooking rivers or marshes. The Late Eneolithic Volosovo
culture of the indigenous forest foragers was quite different in its pottery,
economy, and mortuary customs. It disappeared when the Fatyanovo pio-
neers pushed into the Upper and Middle Volga basin.

The Middle Dnieper and Fatyanovo migrations overlapped the region
where river and lake names in Baltic dialects, related to Latvian and Lithu-
anian, have been mapped by linguists: through the upper and middle
Dnieper basin and the upper Volga as far east as the Oka. These names in-
dicate the former extent of Baltic-speaking populations, which once occu-
pied an area much larger than the area they occupy today. The Middle
Dnieper and Fatyanovo migrations probably established the populations
that spoke pre-Baltic dialects in the Upper Volga basin. Pre-Slavic probably
developed between the middle Dnieper and upper Dniester among the
populations that stayed behind. 8

As Fatyanovo groups spread eastward down the Volga they discovered the
copper ores of the western Ural foothills, and in this region, around the lower
Kama River, they created long-term settlements. The Volga-Kama region,

BctS.' Ato iw ' 2 and 3 -

j&2 Chapter 75

which became the metallurgical heartland for almost all Fatyanovo metal-
lurgy, has been separated from the rest of Fatyanovo and designated the
Balanovo culture. Balanovo seems to be the settled, metal-working aspect of
eastern Fatyanovo. At the southern fringe ol Balanovo territory, in the forest-
steppe zone of the middle Volga and upper Don where the rivers again
flowed south, a fourth group emerged (after Middle Dnieper, Fatyanovo, and
Balanovo). This was Abashevo, the easternmost of the Russian forest-zone
cultures that were descended trom Corded Ware ceramic traditions. The
Abashevo culture played an important role in the origin of Sintashta.

The Abashevo Culture

Abashevo probably began about 2500 BCE or a little later. A late Aba-
shevo kurgan at Pepkino on the middle Volga is dated 2400-2200 BCE
(3850 ±95, Ki-7665); I would guess that the grave actually was created
closer to 2200 BCE. Late Abashevo traditions persisted west of the Urals
probably as late as 1900 BCE, definitely into the Sintashta period, since
late Abashevo vessels are found in Sintashta and Potapovka graves. Early
Abashevo ceramic styles strongly influenced Sintashta ceramics.

Abashevo sites are found predominantly in the forest-steppe zone,
although a few extended into the northern steppes of the middle Volga!
Within the forest-steppe, they are distributed between the upper Don on
the west, a region with many Abashevo settlements (e.g., Kondrashovka);
the middle Volga region in the center, represented largely by kurgan cem-
eteries (including the type-site, the Abashevo kurgan cemetery); and up the
Belaya River into the copper-rich southwestern foothills of the Urals on the
east, again with many settlements (like Balanbash, with plentiful evidence
of copper smelting). More than two hundred Abashevo settlements are re-
corded; only two were clearly fortified, and many seem to have been occu-
pied briefly. The easternmost Abashevo sites wrapped around the southern
slopes of the Urals and extended into the Upper Ural basin, and it is these
sites in particular that played a role in the origins of Sintashta. 9

Some ot the Volosovo foragers who had occupied these regions before
2500 BCE were absorbed into the Abashevo population, and others moved
north. At the northern border of Abashevo territory, cord-impressed Aba-
shevo and comb-stamped Volosovo ceramics are occasionally found inside
the same structures at sites such as Bolshaya Gora. 10 Contact between late
Volosovo and Abashevo populations west of the Urals probably helped to
spread cattle-breeding economies and metallurgy into transitional north-
ern forest cultures such as Chirkovska.

Chariot Warriors j8j

Whereas early Abashevo pottery looked somewhat like Fatyanovo/Bala-
novo Corded Ware, early Abashevo graves were covered by kurgans, unlike
Fatyanovo flat cemeteries. Abashevo kurgans were surrounded by a circular
ditch, the grave pit had ledges at the edges, and the body position was
either contracted on the side or supine with raised knees — funeral customs
derived from the Poltavka culture on the Volga. Abashevo ceramics also
showed increasing decorative influences from steppe Catacomb-culture
ceramic traditions, in both motifs (horizontal line-and-dot, horizontal flut-
ing) and technology (shell tempering). Some Abashevo metal types such
as waisted knives copied Catacomb and Poltavka types. A. D. Pryakhin,
the preeminent expert on the Abashevo culture, concluded that it origi-
nated from contacts between Fatyanovo/Balanovo and Catacomb/Poltavka
populations in the southern forest-steppe. In many ways, the Abashevo
culture was a conduit through which steppe customs spread northward
into the forest-steppe. Most Russian archaeologists interpret the Aba-
shevo culture as a border culture associated with Indo-Iranian speakers,
unlike Fatyanovo. 11

Abashevo settlements in the Belaya River valley such as Balanbash
contained crucibles, slag, and casting waste. Cast shaft-hole axes, knives,
socketed spears, and socketed chisels were made by Abashevo metalsmiths.
About half of all analyzed Abashevo metal objects were made of pure cop-
per from southwestern Ural sandstone ores (particularly ornaments), and
about half were arsenical bronze thought to have been made from south-
eastern Ural quartzitic ores (particularly tools and weapons), the same ores
later exploited by Sintashta miners. High-status Abashevo graves con-
tained copper and silver ornaments, semicircular solid copper and silver
bracelets, cast shaft-hole axes, and waisted knives (figure 15.7). High
status Abashevo women wore distinctive headbands decorated with rows
of flat and tubular beads interspersed with suspended double-spiral and
cast rosette pendants, made of copper and silver. These headbands were
unique to the Abashevo culture and probably were signals of ethnic as well
as political status. 12

The clear signaling of identity seen in Abashevo womens’ headbands
occurred in a context of intense warfare — not just raiding but actual war-
fare. At the cemetery of Pepkino, near the northern limit of Abashevo
territory on the lower Sura River, a single grave pit 11 m long contained
the bodies of twenty- eight young men, eighteen of them decapitated, oth-
ers with axe wounds to the head, axe wounds on the arms, and dismem-
bered extremities. This mass grave, probably dated about 2200 BCE, also
contained Abashevo pottery, a two-part mold for making a shaft-hole axe

3%4 Chapter 13

Figure 15. 7 Abashevo culture graves and metal objects from the middle Volga
forest-steppe {upper left), including distinctive cast copper rosettes; and ce-
ramics from the south Ural region {lower right). After O. V. Kuzmina 1999,
figures 23 and 24 (ceramics); and Bol’shov 1995, figure 13 (grave goods).

Chariot Warriors 383

of Chernykh s Type V, and a crucible. It was covered by a single kurgan
and so probably reflected a single event, clearly a serious battle or massa-
cre. The absence of women or children in the grave indicates that it was
not a settlement massacre. If it was the result of a battle, it implies a force
of 280 to 560 on the Abashevo side alone, because deaths in tribal battles
rarely reached 10% of the fighting force and usually were more like 5%. 13
Forces this size would require a considerable degree of inter-regional politi-
cal integration. Intense warfare, perhaps on a surprising scale, was part of
the political landscape during the late Abashevo era. In this context, the
fortifications around Sintashta settlements and the invention of new fight-
ing technologies — including the chariot — begin to make sense.

Linguists have identified loans that were adopted into the early Finno-
Ugric (F-U) languages from Pre-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Indo-Iranian
(Proto-I-I). Archaeological evidence for Volosovo-Abashevo contacts
around the southern Urals probably were the medium through which
these loans occurred. Early Proto-Indo-Iranian words that were borrowed
into common Finno-Ugric included Proto-I-I *asura- ‘lord, god’ > F-U
*asera\ Proto-I-I *tnecfi u- ‘honey* > F-U *mete\ Proto-I-I *cekro- ‘wheel’ > F-U
*kekra\ and Proto-I-I *arya- ‘Aryan > F-U *orya. Proto-Indo-Iranian *arya-
, the self designation “Aryan,” was borrowed into Pre-Saami as *orja-, the
root of *oarji, meaning “southwest,” and of drjel y meaning “southerner,”
confirming that the Proto-Aryan world lay south of the early Uralic re-
gion. The same borrowed *arya- root developed into words with the mean-
ing “slave” in the Finnish and Permic branches (Finnish, Komi, and
Udmurt), a hint of ancient hostility between the speakers of Proto-Indo-
Iranian and Finno-Ugric. 14

Pre-Sintashta Cultures of the Eastern Steppes

Who lived in the Ural-Tobol steppes during the late Abashevo era, before
the Sintashta strongholds appeared there? There are two local antecedents
and several unrelated neighbors.

Sintashta Antecedents

Just to the north of the steppe zone later occupied by Sintashta settle-
ments, the southern forest-steppe zone contained scattered settlements of
the late Abashevo culture. Abashevo miners regularly worked the quartz-
itic arsenic-rich copper ores of the Ural-Tobol region. Small settlements of
the Ural variant of late Abashevo appeared in the upper Ural River valley

j86 Chapter /j

and perhaps as far east as the upper Tobol. Geometric meanders first be-
came a significant new decorative motif on Abashevo pottery made in the
Ural region [see figure 15.7], and the geometric meander remained popular
in Sintashta motifs. Some early Sintashta graves contained late Abashevo
pots, and some late Abashevo sites west of the Urals contained Sintashta-
type metal weapons and chariot gear such as disc-shaped cheekpieces that
might have originated in the Sintashta culture. But Ural Abashevo people
did not conduct mortuary animal sacrifices on a large scale, many of their
metal types and ornaments were different, and, even though a few of their
settlements were surrounded by small ditches, this was unusual. They were
not fortified like the Sintashta settlements in the steppes.

Poltavka-culture herders had earlier occupied the northern steppe zone
just where Sintashta appeared. The Poltavka culture was essentially a
Volga-Ural continuation of the early Yamnaya horizon. Poltavka herding
groups moved east into the Ural-Tobol steppes probably between 2800
and 2600 BCE. Poltavka decorative motifs on ceramics (vertical columns
of chevrons) were very common on Sintashta pottery. A Poltavka kurgan
cemetery (undated) stood on a low ridge 400 m south of the future site of
Arkaim before that fortified settlement was built near the marshy bottom
of the valley. 15 The cemetery, Aleksandrovska IV, contained twnety-one
small (10-20 m in diameter) kurgans, a relatively large Poltavka cemetery
(figure 15.8). Six were excavated. All conformed to the typical Poltavka
rite: a kurgan surrounded by a circular ditch, with a single grave with
ledges, the body tightly contracted on the left or right side, lying on an
organic mat, red ochre or white chalk by the head and occasionally around
the whole body, with a pot or a flint tool or nothing. A few animal bones
occasionally were dropped in the perimeter ditch. A Poltavka settlement
was stratified beneath the Sintashta settlement of Kuisak, which is in-
triguing because Poltavka settlements, like Yamnaya settlements, are gen-
erally unknown. Unfortunately this one was badly disturbed by the Sintashta
settlement that was built on top of it. 16

In the middle Volga region, the Potapovka culture was a contemporary
sister of Sintashta, with similar graves, metal types, weapons, horse sacri-
fices, and chariot-driving gear (bone cheekpieces and whip handles), dated
by radiocarbon to the same period, 2100-1800 BCE. Potapovka pottery,
like Sintashta, retained many Poltavka decorative traits, and Potapovka
graves were occasionally situated directly on top of older Poltavka monu-
ments. Some Potapovka graves were dug right through preexisting Pol-
tavka graves, destroying them, as some Sintashta strongholds were built
on top of and incorporated older Poltavka settlements. 17 It is difficult to

Chariot Warriors j8y

i

Figure 15.8 Arkaim settlement landscape with the kurgan cemeteries of
Aleksandrovka IV (1), an older Poltavka cemetery of six kurgans; and Bol-
shekaragandskoe I and IV (5), with two excavated Sintashta-culture kurgans
(24 and 25). Composite of Zdanovich 2002, Figure 3; and Batanina and Iva-
nova 1995, figure 2.

imagine that this was accidental. A symbolic connection with old Poltavka
clans must have guided these choices.

Poltavka herders might have begun to explore across the vast Kazakh
plains toward Sarazm, an outpost of Central Asian urban civilization
established before 3000 BCE near modern Samarkand in the Zer-
avshan valley (see figure 16.1). Its northern location placed it just

j88 Chapter /j

beyond the range of steppe herders who pushed east of the Urals around
2500 BCE. 18

Hunters and Traders in Central Asia and the Forest Zone

Between the Poltavka territory in the upper Tobol steppes and Sarazm in
the Zeravshan Valley lived at least two distinct groups of foragers. In the
south, around the southern, western, and eastern margins of the Aral Sea,
was the Kelteminar culture, a culture of relatively sedentary hunters and
gatherers who built large reed-covered houses near the marshes and lakes
in the steppes and in the riverbank thickets (called tugai forest) of the
Amu Darya (Oxus) and lower Zeravshan rivers, where huge Siberian ti-
gers still prowled. Kelteminar hunters pursued bison and wild pigs in the
tugai, and gazelle, onagers, and Bactrian camels in the steppes and des-
erts. No wild horses ranged south of the Kyzl Kum desert, so Kelteminar
hunters never saw horses, but they caught lots offish, and collected wild
pomegranates and apricots. They made a distinctive incised and stamped
pottery. Early Kelteminar sites such as Dingil’dzhe 6 had microlithic flint
industries much like those of Dzhebel Cave layer IV, dated about 5000
BCE. Kelteminar foragers probably began making pottery about this time,
toward the end of the sixth millennium BCE. Late Kelteminar lasted
until around 2000 BCE. Kelteminar pottery was found at Sarazm (level
II), but the Kyzl Kum desert, north of the Amu Darya River, seems to
have been an effective barrier to north-south communication with the
northern steppes. Turquoise, which outcropped on the lower Zeravshan
and in the desert southeast of the Aral Sea, was traded southward across
Iran but not into the northern steppes. Turquoise ornaments appeared at
Sarazm, at many early cities on the Iranian plateau, and even in the Mai-
kop chieftains grave (chapter 12), but not among the residents of the
northern steppes. 19

A second and quite different network of foragers lived in the northern
steppes, north of the Aral Sea and the Syr Darya river (the ancient Jax-
artes). Here the desert faded into the steppes of central and northern
Kazakhstan, where the biggest predators were wolves and the largest
grazing mammals were wild horses and saiga antelope (both absent in the
Kelteminar region). In the lusher northern steppes, the descendants of
the late Botai-Tersek culture still rode horses, hunted, and fished, but
some of them now kept a few domesticated cattle and sheep and also
worked metal. The post-Botai settlement of Sergeivka on the middle
Ishim River is dated by radiocarbon about 2800-2600 BCE (4160 ±80

Chariot Warriors j8g

BP, OxA-4439). It contained pottery similar to late Botai-Tersek pottery,
stone tools typical for late Botai-Tersek, and about 390 bones of horses
(87%) but also 60 bones of cattle and sheep (13%), a new element in the
economy of this region. Fireplaces, slag, and copper ore also were found.
Very few sites like Sergeivka have been recognized in northern Kazakh-
stan. But Sergeivka shows that by 2800-2600 BCE an indigenous metal-
lurgy and a little herding had begun in northern Kazakhstan. The impetus
for these innovations probably was the arrival of Poltavka herders in the
Tobol steppes. Pottery similar to that at Sergeivka was found in the Pol-
tavka graves at Aleksandrovska IV, confirming contact between the two. 20

North of the Ural-Tobol steppes, the foragers who occupied the forested
eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains had little effect on the early Sintashta
culture. Their natural environment was rich enough to permit them to live
in relatively long-term settlements on river banks while still depending
just on hunting and fishing. They had no formal cemeteries. Their pottery
had complex comb-stamped geometric motifs all over the exterior surface.
Ceramic decorations and shapes were somewhat similar between the
forest-zone Ayatskii and Lipchinskii cultures on one side and the steppe
zone Botai-Tersek cultures on the other. But in most material ways the
forest-zone cultures remained distinct from Poltavka and Abashevo, until
the appearance of the Sintashta culture, when this relationship changed.
Forest-zone cultures adopted many Sintashta customs after about 2200-
2100 BCE. Crucibles, slag, and copper rods interpreted as ingots appeared
at Tashkovo II and Iska III, forager settlements located on the Tobol River
north of Sintashta. The animal bones from these settlements were still from
wild game — elk, bear, and fish. Some Tashkovo II ceramics displayed geo-
metric meander designs borrowed from late Abashevo or Sintashta. And
the houses at Tashkovo II and Andreevskoe Ozero XIII were built in a
circle around an open central plaza, as at Sintashta or Arkaim, a settle-
ment plan atypical of the forest zone.

The Origin of the Sintashta Culture

A cooler, more arid climate affected the Eurasian steppes after about 2500
BCE, reaching a peak of aridity around 2000 BCE. Ancient pollen grains
cored from bogs and lake floors across the Eurasian continent show the ef-
fects this event had on wetland plant communities. 21 Forests retreated,
open grassland expanded, and marshes dwindled. The steppes southeast of
the Ural Mountains, already drier and colder than the Middle Volga grass-
lands southwest of the Urals, became drier still. Around 2100 BCE a

jgo Chapter 15

voDosovo I

Bolshaya

/ O» X ^N # / ( J 0ra ^

Nl Abashevo \rhrgriofi-

• . kiirn^nl Jr I N a "

Y N. Abashevo
r> lrferka kur 9^
iFilatovka

flashkovol
I Iska III

Kondrashevka/

NLopatino Balanbash
r 1 ^ /chernorjeh'e

Vilo va to vo^X^Ad vk d r ka i m

t , TF

J#Berezovka

^Arkaim

c . r

Kargalyi

• ^ PetrovkaAv

w \ r

PKammenyi Ambar
,*<T l

Sintashta

Dzhekazgan i

Figure 15.9 Sites of the period 2100-1800 BCE in the northern steppe and
southern forest-steppe between the Don and the Ishim, with the locations of
proven Bronze Age copper mines. The Sintashta-Potapovka-Filatovka com-
plex probably is the archaeological manifestation of the Indo-Iranian lan-
guage group.

mixed population of Poltavka and Abashevo herders began to settle in for-
tified strongholds between the upper Tobol and Ural River valleys, near the
shrinking marshes that were vital for wintering their herds (see figure
15.9). Eurasian steppe pastoralists have generally favored marshy regions as
winter refuges because of the winter forage and protection offered by stands
of Phragmites reeds up to three meters tall. In a study of mobility among
Late Mesolithic foragers in the Near East, Michael Rosenberg found that
mobile populations tended to settle near critical resources when threatened
with increased competition and declining productivity. He compared the
process to a game of musical chairs, 22 in which the risk of losing a critical
resource, in this case, winter marshlands for the cattle, was the impetus for
settling down. Most Sintashta settlements were built on the first terrace
overlooking the floodplain of a marshy, meandering stream. Although heav-
ily fortified, these settlements were put in marshy, low places rather than on
more easily defended hills nearby (see figures 15.2 and 15.8).

More than twenty Sintashta-type walled settlements were erected in the
Ural-Tobol steppes between about 2100 and 1800 BCE. Their impressive

Chariot Warriors 391

fortifications indicate that concentrating people and herds near a critical
wintering place was not sufficient in itself to protect it. Walls and towers
also were required. Raiding must have been endemic. Intensified fighting
encouraged tactical innovations, most important the invention of the light
war chariot. This escalation of conflict and competition between rival
tribal groups in the northern steppes was accompanied by elaborate cere-
monies and feasts at funerals conducted within sight of the walls. Compe-
tition between rival hosts led to potlatch-type excesses such as the sacrifice
of chariots and whole horses.

The geographic position of Sintashta societies at the eastern border of
the Pontic-Caspian steppe world exposed them to many new cultures,
from foragers to urban civilizations. Contact with the latter probably was
most responsible for the escalation in metal production, funeral sacrifices,
and warfare that characterized the Sintashta culture. The brick-walled
towns of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) in
Central Asia connected the metal miners of the northern steppes with an
almost bottomless market for copper. One text from the city of Ur in
present-day Iraq, dated to the reign of Rim-Sin of Larsa (1822-1763
BCE), recorded the receipt of 18,333 km (40,417 lb, or 20 tons) of copper
in a single shipment, most of it earmarked for only one merchant. ~ This
old and well-oiled Asian trade network was connected to the northern
Eurasian steppes for the first time around 2100-2000 BCE (see chapter
16 for the contact between Sintashta and BMAC sites).

The unprecedented increase in demand for metal is documented most
clearly on the floors of Sintashta houses. Sintashta settlements were indus-
trial centers that specialized in metal production. Every excavated struc-
ture at Sintashta, Arkaim, and Uste contained the remains of smelting
ovens and slag from processing copper ore. The metal in the majority of
finished objects was arsenical bronze, usually in alloys of 1-2.5% arsenic;
tin-bronzes comprised only 2% or less of metal objects. At Sintashta, 36 ^
of tested objects were made of copper with elevated arsenic (from 0.1-1%
arsenic), and 48% were classified as arsenical bronze (over 1% arsenic).
Unalloyed copper objects were more frequent at Arkaim, where they con-
stituted almost half the tested objects, than at Sintashta, where they made
up only 10% of tested objects. Clay tubular pipes probably for the mouths
of the bellows, or tulieres , occurred in graves and settlements (see figure
15.4). Pieces of crucibles were found in graves at Krivoe Ozero. Closed
two-piece molds were required to cast bronze shaft-hole axes and spear
blades (see figure 15.10). Open single-piece molds for casting curved sick-
les and rod-like copper ingots were found in the Arkaim settlement.

Chariot Warriors jpj

Ingots or rods of metal weighing 50-130 g might have been produced for
export. An estimated six thousand tons of quartzitic rock bearing 2-3%
copper was mined from the single excavated mining site of Vorovskaya
Yama east of the upper Ural River. 24

Warfare, a powerful stimulus to social and political change, also shaped
the Sintashta culture, for a heightened threat of conflict dissolves the old
social order and creates new opportunities for the acquisition of power.
Nicola DiCosmo has recently argued that complex political structures
arose among steppe nomads in the Iron Age largely because intensified
warfare led to the establishment of permanent bodyguards around rival
chiefs, and these grew in size until they became armies, which engendered
state-like institutions designed to organize, feed, reward, and control
them. Susan Vehik studied political change in the deserts and grasslands
of the North American Southwest after 1200 CE, during a period of in-
creased aridity and climatic volatility comparable to the early Sintashta era
in the steppes. Warfare increased sharply during this climatic downturn
in the Southwest. Vehik found that long-distance trade increased greatly
at the same time; trade after 1350 CE was more than forty times greater
than it had been before then. To succeed in war, chiefs needed wealth to
fund alliance-building ceremonies before the conflict and to reward allies
afterward. Similarly, during the climatic crisis of the late MBA in the
steppes, competing steppe chiefs searching for new sources of prestige
valuables probably discovered the merchants of Sarazm in the Zeravshan
valley, the northernmost outpost of Central Asian civilization. Although
the connection with Central Asia began as an extension of old competi-
tions between tribal chiefs, it created a relationship that fundamentally
altered warfare, metal production, and ritual competition among the
steppe cultures. 25

Warfare in the Sintashta Culture:

Fortifications and Weapons

A significant increase in the intensity of warfare in the southern Ural
steppes is apparent from three factors: the regular appearance of large
fortified towns; increased deposits of weapons in graves; and the develop-
ment of new weapons and tactics. All the Sintashta settlements excavated
to date, even relatively small ones like Chernorechye III, with perhaps six
structures (see figure 15.11), and Uste, with fourteen to eighteen struc-
tures, were fortified with V-shaped ditches and timber-reinforced earthen
walls. 26 Wooden palisade posts were preserved inside the earthen walls at

394 Chapter is

Figure 15.11 Smaller walled settlements of the Sintashta type at Ust’e and
Chernorech’e III. After Vinogradov 2003, figure 3.

Chariot Warriors jpj

Ust’ye, Arkaim, and Sintashta. Communities build high walls and gates
when they have reason to fear that their homes will come under attack.

Tire graves outside the walls now also contained many more weapons
than in earlier times. The Russian archaeologist A. Epimakhov published a
catalogue of excavated graves from five cemeteries of the Sintashta culture:
Bol’shekaragandskoe (the cemetery for the Arkaim citadel), Kammeny
Ambar 5, Krivoe Ozero, Sintashta, and Solntse II. 2 ' The catalogue listed
242 individuals in 181 graves. Of these, 65 graves contained weapons.
Only 79 of the 242 individuals were adults, but 43 of these, or 54% of all
adults, were buried with weapons. Most of the adults in the weapon graves
were not assigned a gender, but of the 13 that were, 11 were males. Most
adult males of the Sintashta culture probably were buried with weapons. In
graves of the Poltavka, Catacomb, or Abashevo cultures, weapons had been
unusual. They were more frequent in Abashevo than in the steppe graves,
but the great majority of Abashevo graves did not contain weapons of any
kind, and, when they did, usually it was a single axe or a projectile point.
My reading of reports on kurgan graves of the earlier EBA and MBA sug-
gests to me that less than 10% contained weapons. The frequency of weap-
ons in adult graves of the Sintashta culture (54%) was much higher.

New types of weapons also appeared. Most of the weapon types in
Sintashta graves had appeared earlier — bronze or copper daggers, flat axes,
shaft-hole axes, socketed spears, polished stone mace heads, and flint or bone
projectile points. In Sintashta-culture graves, however, longer, heavier pro-
jectile point types appeared, and they were deposited in greater numbers.
One new projectile was a spearhead made of heavy bronze or copper with a
socketed base for a thick wooden spear handle. Smaller, lighter-socketed
spearheads had been used occasionally in the Fatyanovo culture, but the
Sintashta spear was larger (see figure 15.3). Sintashta graves also contained
two varieties of chipped flint projectile points: lanceolate and stemmed (see
figure 15.12). Short lanceolate points with flat or slightly hollow bases be-
came longer in the Sintashta period, and these were deposited in groups for
the first time. They might have been for arrows, since prehistoric arrow
points were light in weight and usually had flat or hollow bases. Lanceolate
flint points with a hollow or flat base occurred in seven graves at Sintashta,
with up to ten points in one grave (SM gr. 39). A set of five lanceolate
points was deposited in the chariot grave of Berlyk II, kurgan 10.

More interesting were flint points of an entirely new type, with a con-
tracting stem, defined shoulders, and a long, narrow blade with a thick me-
dial ridge, 4-10 cm long. These new stemmed points might have been for
javelins. Their narrow, thick blades were ideal for javelin points because the

jg 6 Chapter 13

o <o o o <o o> <o <o o> o> d

0 1 2 3 4 5cm

Figure 15.12 Flint projectile point types of the Sintashta culture. The top row
was a new type for steppe cultures, possibly related to the introduction of the
javelin. The bottom row was an old type in the steppes, possibly used for ar-
rows, although in older EBA and MBA graves it was more triangular. After
Gening, Zdanovich, and Gening 1992.

heavier shaft of a javelin (compared to an arrow) causes greater torque stress
on the embedded point at the moment of impact; moreover, a narrow, thick
point could penetrate deeper before breaking than a thin point could. 28 A
stemmed point, by definition, is mounted in a socketed foreshaft, a complex
type of attachment usually found on spears or javelins rather than arrows.
Smaller stemmed points had existed earlier in Fatyanovo and Balanovo tool
kits and were included in occasional graves, as at the Fatyanovo cemetery of
Volosovo-Danilovskii, where 1 grave out of 107 contained a stemmed point,
but it was shorter than the Sintashta type (only 3-4 cm long). Sintashta
stemmed points appeared in sets of up to twenty in a single grave (chariot gr.
20 at the Sintashta SM cemetery), as well as in a few Potapovka graves on
the middle Volga. Stemmed points made of cast bronze, perhaps imitations
of the flint stemmed ones, occurred in one chariot grave (SM gr. 16) and in
two other graves at Sintashta (see figure 15.11).

Weapons were deposited more frequently in Sintashta graves. New
kinds of weapons appeared, among them long points probably intended
for javelins, and they were deposited in sets that appear to represent war-
riors’ equipment for battle. Another signal of increased conflict is the
most hotly debated artifact of this period in the steppes — the light, horse-
drawn chariot.

Chariot Warriors 397

Sintashta Chariots: Engines of War

A chariot is a two-wheeled vehicle with spoked wheels and a standing
driver, pulled by bitted horses, and usually driven at a gallop. A two-wheeler
with solid wheels or a seated driver is a cart, not a chariot. Carts, like wag-
ons, were work vehicles. Chariots were the first wheeled vehicles designed
for speed, an innovation that changed land transport forever. The spoked
wheel was the central element that made speed possible. The earliest spoked
wheels were wonders of bent-wood joinery and fine carpentry. The rim
had to be a perfect circle of joined wood, firmly attached to individually
carved spokes inserted into mortices in the outer wheel and a multi-socketed
central nave, all carved and planed out of wood with hand tools. The cars
also were stripped down to just a few wooden struts. Later Egyptian chariots
had wicker walls and a floor of leather straps for shock absorption, with only
the frame made of wood. Perhaps originally designed for racing at funerals,
the chariot quickly became a weapon and, in that capacity, changed history.

Today most authorities credit the invention of the chariot to Near East-
ern societies around 1900-1800 BCE. Until recently, scholars believed that
the chariots of the steppes post-dated those of the Near East. Carvings or
petroglyphs showing chariots on rock outcrops in the mountains of eastern
Kazakhstan and the Russian Altai were ascribed to the Late Bronze Age
Andronovo horizon, thought to date after 1650 BCE. Disk-shaped cheek-
pieces made of antler or bone found in steppe graves were considered copies
of older Mycenaean Greek cheekpieces designed for the bridles of chariot
teams. Because the Mycenaean civilization began about 1650 BCE, the
steppe cheekpieces also were assumed to date after 1650 BCE. 2J

The increasing amount of information about chariot graves in the steppes
since about 1992 has challenged this orthodox view. The archaeological
evidence of steppe chariots survives only in graves where the wheels were
placed in slots that had been dug into the grave floors. The lower parts of
the wheels left stains in the earth as they rotted (see figure 15.13). These
stains show an outer circle of bent wood 1—1.2 m in diameter with ten to
twelve square-sectioned spokes. There is disagreement as to the number of
clearly identified chariot graves because the spoke imprints are faint, but
even the conservative estimate yields sixteen chariot graves in nine ceme-
teries. All belonged to either the Sintashta culture in the Ural-Tobol steppes
or the Petrovka culture east of Sintashta in northern Kazakhstan. Petrovka
was contemporary with late Sintashta, perhaps 1900-1750 BC, and devel-
oped directly from it. 30

• '

+** if

«#• ,

mm - 1 • l

1

f f **■:- ' I

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Chariot Warriors J99

Scholars disagree as to whether steppe chariots were effective instru-
ments of war or merely symbolic vehicles designed only for parade or ritual
use, made in barbaric imitation of superior Near Eastern originals. 31 This
debate has focused, surprisingly, on the distance between the chariots’
wheels. Near Eastern war chariots had crews of two or even three — a
driver and an archer, and occasionally a shield-bearer to protect the other
two from incoming missiles. The gauge or track width of Egyptian chari-
ots of ca. 1400-1300 BCE, the oldest Near Eastern chariots preserved
well enough to measure, was 1.54-1.80 m. The hub or nave of the wheel, a
necessary part that stabilized the chariot, projected at least 20 cm along the
axle on each side. A gauge around 1.4-1. 5 m would seem the minimum to
provide enough room between the wheels for the two inner hubs or naves
(20 + 20 cm) and a car at least 1 m wide to carry two men. Sintashta and
Petrovka-culture chariots with less than 1.4-1. 5 m between their wheels
were interpreted as parade or ritual vehicles unfit for war.

This dismissal of the functional utility of steppe chariots is unconvinc-
ing for six reasons. First, steppe chariots were made in many sizes, includ-
ing two at Kammeny Ambar 5, two at Sintashta (SM gr. 4, 28) and two at
Berlyk (Petrovka culture) with a gauge between 1.4 and 1.6 m, big enough
for a crew of two. The first examples published in English, which were
from Sintashta (SM gr. 19) and Krivoe Ozero (k. 9, gr. 1), had gauges of
only about 1.2-1. 3 m, as did three other Sintashta chariots (SM gr. 5, 12,
30) and one other Krivoe Ozero chariot. The argument against the utility
of steppe chariots focused on these six vehicles, most of which, in spite of
their narrow gauges, were buried with weapons. However, six other steppe
vehicles were as wide as some Egyptian war chariots. One (Sintashta SM
gr. 28) with a gauge of about 1.5 m was placed in a grave that also con-
tained the partial remains of two adults, possibly its crew. Even if we ac-
cept the doubtful assumption that war chariots needed a crew of two,
many steppe chariots were big enough. 32

Second, steppe chariots were not necessarily used as platforms for archers.
The preferred weapon in the steppes might have been the javelin. A single

Figure 15.13 Chariot grave at Krivoe Ozero, kurgan 9, grave 1, dated about 2000
BCE: (1-3) three typical Sintashta pots; (5-6) two pairs of studded disk cheek-
pieces made of antler; (4) a bone and a flint projectile point; (7-8) a waisted
bronze dagger and a flat bronze axe; (9-10) spoked wheel impressions from
wheels set into slots in the floor of the grave; (11) detail of artist’s reconstruction
of the remains of the nave or hub on the left wheel. After Anthony and Vinogra-
dov 1995, photos by Vinogradov.

400 Chapter /j

warrior-driver could hold the reins in one hand and hurl a javelin with the
other. From a standing position in a chariot, a driver-warrior could use his
entire body to throw, whereas a man on horseback without stirrups (in-
vented after 300 CE) could use only his arm and shoulder. A javelin-hurling
charioteer could strike a man on horseback before the rider could strike
him. Unlike a charioteer, a man on horseback could not carry a large sheath
full of javelins and so would be at a double disadvantage if his first cast
missed. A rider armed with a bow would fare only slightly better. Archers of
the steppe Bronze Age seem to have used bows 1.2-1. 5 m long, judging by
bow remains found at Berezovka (k. 3, gr. 2) and Svatove (k. 12, gr. 12). 33
Bows this long could be fired from horseback only to the side (the left side,
for a right-handed archer), which made riders with long bows vulnerable. A
charioteer armed with javelins could therefore intimidate a Bronze Age
rider on horseback. Many long-stemmed points, suitable for javelins, were
found in some chariot graves (Sintashta SM gr. 4, 5, 30). If steppe chario-
teers used javelins, a single man could use narrower cars in warfare.

Third, if a single driver-warrior needed to switch to a bow in battle, he
could fire arrows while guiding the horses with the reins around his hips.
Tomb paintings depicted the Egyptian pharaoh driving and shooting a bow
in this way. Although it may have been a convention to include only the
pharaoh in these illustrations, Littauer noted that a royal Egyptian scribe
was also shown driving and shooting in this way, and in paintings of Ramses
III fighting the Libyans the archers in the Egyptian two-man chariots had
the reins around their hips. Their car-mates helped to drive with one hand
and used a shield with the other. Etruscan and Roman charioteers also fre-
quently drove with the reins wrapped around their hips. 34 A single driver-
warrior might have used a bow in this manner, although it would have been
safer to shift the reins to one hand and cast a javelin.

The fourth reason not to dismiss the functionality of steppe chariots is
that most of these chariots, including the narrow-gauge ones, were buried
with weapons. I have seen complete inventories for twelve Sintashta and
Petrovka chariot graves, and ten contained weapons. The most frequent
weapons were projectile points, but chariot graves also contained metal-
waisted daggers, flat metal axes, metal shaft-hole axes, polished stone mace
heads, and one metal-socketed spearhead 20 cm long (from Sintashta SM
gr. 30; see figure 15.3). According to Epimakhovs catalogue of Sintashta
graves, cited earlier, all chariot graves where the skeleton could be assigned
a gender contained an adult male. If steppe chariots were not designed for
war, why were most of them buried with a male driver and weapons?

Fifth, a new kind of bridle cheekpiece appeared in the steppes at the
very time that chariots did (see figure 15.14). It was made of antler or bone

Sintashta-Arkaim complex Filatovskii kurgan, upper Don

Kamennyi Ambar 5 Kurgan 2 Grave 8 Grave 1 , 2 pairs of cheekpieces

Figure 15.14 Studded disk cheekpieces from graves of the Sintashta, Pota-
povka, and Filatovka types. The band of running spirals beneath the checker-
board panel on the upper left specimen from Utyevka VI was once thought to
be derived from Mycenae. But the steppe examples like this one were older
than Mycenae. Photos by the author; drawings after Epimakhov 2002; and
Siniuk and Kosmirchuk 1995.

402 Chapter /j

Chariot Warriors 40J

and shaped like an oblong disk or a shield, perforated in the center so that
cords could pass through to connect the bit to the bridle and in various
other places to allow for attachments to the noseband and cheek-strap.
Pointed studs or prongs on its inner face pressed into the soft flesh at the
corners of the horses mouth when the driver pulled the reins on the op-
posite side, prompting an immediate response from the horse. The devel-
opment of a new, more severe form of driving control suggests that rapid,
precise maneuvers by the driving team were necessary. When disk cheek-
pieces are found in pairs, different shapes with different kinds of wear are
often found together, as if the right and left sides of the horse, or the right
and left horses, needed slightly different kinds of control. For example, at
Krivoe Ozero (k. 9, gr. 1), the cheekpieces with the left horse had a slot
located above the central hole, angled upward, toward the noseband (see
figure 15.13). The cheekpieces with the right horse had no such upward-
angled slot. A similar unmatched pair, with and without an upward-
angled slot, were buried with a chariot team at Kamennyi Ambar 5 (see
figure 15.14). The angled slot may have been for a noseband attached to
the reins that would pull down on the inside (left) horse s nose, acting as a
brake, when the reins were pulled, while the outside (right) horse was
allowed to run free — -just what a left-turning racing team would need.
The chariot race, as described in the Rig Veda y was a frequent metaphor for
life’s challenges, and Vedic races turned to the left. Chariot cheekpieces of
the same general design, a bone disk with sharp prongs on its inner face,
appeared later in Shaft Grave IV at Mycenae and in the Levant at Tel
Haror, made of metal. Tie oldest examples appeared in the steppes. 35

Finally, the sixth flaw in the argument that steppe chariots were poorly
designed imitations of superior Near Eastern originals is that the oldest
examples of the former predate any of the dated chariot images in the
Near East. Eight radiocarbon dates have been obtained from five Sintashta-
culture graves containing the impressions of spoked wheels, including
three at Sintashta (SM cemetery, gr. 5, 19, 28), one at Krivoe Ozero (k. 9,
gr. 1), and one at Kammeny Ambar 5 (k. 2, gr. 8). Tiree of these (3760± 120
BP, 3740 ±50 BP, and 3700160 BP), with probability distributions that
fall predominantly before 2000 BCE, suggest that the earliest chariots
probably appeared in the steppes before 2000 BCE (table 15.1). Disk-
shaped cheekpieces, usually interpreted as specialized chariot gear, also
occur in steppe graves of the Sintashta and Potapovka types dated by ra-
diocarbon before 2000 BCE. In contrast, in the Near East the oldest im-
ages of true chariots — vehicles with two spoked wheels, pulled by horses
rather than asses or onagers, controlled with bits rather than lip- or nose-

rings, and guided by a standing warrior, not a seated driver— first appeared
about 1800 BCE, on Old Syrian seals. The oldest images in Near Eastern
art of vehicles with two spoked wheels appeared on seals from Karum
Kanesh II, dated about 1900 BCE, but the equids were of an uncertain
type (possibly native asses or onagers) and they were controlled by nose-
rings (see figure 15.15). Excavations at Tell Brak in northern Syria recov-
ered 102 cart models and 191 equid figurines from the parts of this ancient
walled caravan city dated to the late Akkadian and Ur III periods, 2350
2000 BCE by the standard or “middle” chronology. None of the equid
figurines was clearly a horse. Two-wheeled carts were common among the
vehicle models, but they had built-in seats and solid wheels. No chariot
models were found. Chariots were unknown here as they were elsewhere
in the Near East before about 1800 BCE. 3h

Chariots were invented earliest in the steppes, where they were used in
warfare. They were introduced to the Near East through Central Asia,
with steppe horses and studded disk cheekpieces (see chapter 16). The
horse-drawn chariot was faster and more maneuverable than the old solid-
wheeled battle-cart or battle-wagon that had been pulled into inter-urban
battles by ass-onager hybrids in the armies of Early Dynastic, Akkadian,
and Ur ill kings between 2900 and 2000 BCE. These heavy, clumsy
vehicles, mistakenly described as chariots in many books and catalogues,
were similar to steppe chariots in one way: they were consistently depicted
carrying javelin-hurling warriors, not archers. When horse-drawn chari-
ots appeared in the Near East they quickly came to dominate inter-urban
battles as swift platforms for archers, perhaps a Near Eastern innovation.
Their wheels also were made differently, with just four or six spokes, ap-
parently another improvement on the steppe design.

Among the Mitanni of northern Syria, in 1500—1350 BC, whose char-
iot tactics might have been imported with their Old Indie chariot termi-
nology from a source somewhere in the steppes, chariots were organized
into squadrons of five or six; six such units (thirty to thirty-six chariots)
were combined with infantry under a brigade commander. A similar orga-
nization appeared in Chou China a millennium later: five chariots in a
squadron, five squadrons in a brigade (twenty-five), with ten to twenty-
five support infantry for each chariot. 37 Steppe chariots might also have
operated in squadrons supported by individuals on foot or even on
horseback, who could have run forward to pursue the enemy with hand
weapons or to rescue the charioteer if he were thrown.

Chariots were effective in tribal wars in the steppes: they were noisy, fast,
and intimidating, and provided an elevated platform from which a skilled

404 Chapter /j

TTTviMT

Figure 15.15 Two-wheeled, high-speed vehicles of the ancient Near East prior
to the appearance of the chariot: (a) cast copper model of a straddle-car with
solid wheels pulled by a team of ass-onager-type equids from Tell Agrab,
2700-2500 BCE; (b and c) engraved seal images of vehicles with four-spoked
wheels, pulled by equids (?) controlled with lip- or nose-rings from karum
Kanesh II, 1900 BCE. After Raulwing 2000, figures 7.2 and 10.1.

Near Eastern two-wheelers

Chariot Warriors 405

driver could hurl a sheath full of javelins. As the car hit uneven ground at
high speed, the drivers legs had to absorb each bounce, and the drivers
weight had to shift to the bouncing side. To drive through a turn, the in-
side horse had to be pulled in while the outside horse was given rein. Doing
this well and hurling a javelin at the same time required a lot of practice.
Chariots were supreme advertisements of wealth; difficult to make and re-
quiring great athletic skill and a team of specially trained horses to drive,
they were available only to those who could delegate much of their daily
labor to hired herders. A chariot was material proof that the driver was able
to fund a substantial alliance or was supported by someone who had the
means. Taken together, the evidence from fortifications, weapon types, and
numbers, and the tactical innovation of chariot warfare, all indicate that
conflict increased in both scale and intensity in the northern steppes during
the early Sintashta period, after about 2100 BCE. It is also apparent that
chariots played an important role in this new kind of conflict.

Tournaments of Value

Parallels between the funerals of the Sintashta chiefs and the funeral hymns
of the Rig Veda (see below) suggest that poetry surrounded chariot burials.
Archaeology reveals that feasts on a surprising scale also accompanied
chiefly funerals. Poetry and feasting were central to a mortuary perfor-
mance that emphasized exclusivity, hierarchy, and power — what the an-
thropologist A. Appadurai called “tournaments of value,” ceremonies meant
to define membership in the elite and to channel political competition
within clear boundaries that excluded most people. In order to understand
the nature of these sacrificial dramas, we first have to understand the ev-
eryday secular diet. 38

Flotation of seeds and charcoal from the soils excavated at Arkaim recov-
ered only a few charred grains of barley, too few, in fact, to be certain that
they came from the Sintashta-culture site rather than a later occupation. Tie
people buried at Arkaim had no dental caries, indicating that they ate a very
low-starch diet, not starchy cereals. 39 Tieir teeth were like those of hunter-
gatherers. Charred millet was found in test excavations at the walled
Alands koe stronghold, indicating that some millet cultivation probably oc-
curred at some sites, and dental decay was found in the Krivoe Ozero cem-
etery population, so some communities might have consumed cultivated
grain. Gathering wild seeds from Ghenopodium and Amaranthus y plants that
still played an important role in the LBA steppe diet centuries later (see
chapter 16 for LBA wild plants), could have supplemented occasional cereal

406 Chapter /j

cultivation. Cultivated cereals seem to have played a minor role in the
Sintashta diet. 40

The scale of animal sacrifices in Sintashta cemeteries implies very large
funerals. One example was Sacrificial Complex 1 at the northern edge of
the Sintashta SM cemetery (see figure 15.16). In a pit 50 cm deep, the
heads and hooves of six horses, four cattle, and two rams lay in two rows
facing one another around an overturned pot. This single sacrifice pro-
vided about six thousand pounds (2,700 kg) of meat, enough to supply
each of three thousand participants with two pounds (.9 kg). The Bolshoi
Kurgan, built just a few meters to the north, required, by one estimate,
three thousand man-days. 41 The workforce required to build the kurgan
matched the amount of food provided by Sacrificial Complex 1. However,
the Bolshoi Kurgan was unique; the other burial mounds at Sintashta were
small and low. If the sacrifices that accompanied the other burials at
Sintashta were meant to feed work parties, what they built is not obvious.
It seems more likely that most sacrifices were intended to provide food for
the funeral guests. With up to eight horses sacrificed for a single funeral,
Sintashta feasts would have fed hundreds, even thousands of guests. Feast-
hosting behavior is the most common and consistently used avenue to
prestige and power in tribal societies. 42

The central role of horses in Sintashta funeral sacrifices was unprece-
dented in the steppes. Horse bones had appeared in EBA and earlier
MBA graves but not in great numbers, and not as frequently as those of
sheep or cattle. The animal bones from the Sintashta and Arkaim settle-
ment refuse middens were 60% cattle, 26% sheep-goat, and 13% horse.
Although beef supplied the preponderance of the meat diet, the funeral
sacrifices in the cemeteries contained just 23% cattle, 37% sheep-goat, and
39% horse. Horses were sacrificed more than any other animal, and horse
bones were three times more frequent in funeral sacrifices than in settle-
ment middens. The zoologist L. Gaiduchenko suggested that the Arkaim
citadel specialized in horse breeding for export because the high level of
15 N isotopes in human bone suggested that horses, very low in 15 N, were
not eaten frequently. Foods derived from cattle and sheep, significantly
higher in 1? N than the horses from these sites, probably composed most of
the diet. 43 According to Epimakhov s catalogue of five Sintashta cemeter-
ies, the most frequent animal sacrifices were horses but they were sacri-
ficed in no more than 48 of the 181 graves catalogued, or 27%; multiple
horses were sacrificed in just 13% of graves. About one-third of the graves
contained weapons, but, among these, two-thirds of graves with horse
sacrifices contained weapons, and 83% of graves with multiple horse sacri-
fices contained weapons. Only a minority of Sintashta graves contained

Sintashta cemetery SM sacrificial complex 1

0 20 40 60cm

408 Chapter 15

signal of social hierarchy, are weak in all crafts except metallurgy, but even
in that craft, every household in every settlement seems to have worked
metal. The absence of large houses, storage facilities, or craft specialists has
led some experts to doubt whether the Sintashta culture had a strong social
hierarchy. 44 Sintashta cemeteries contained the graves of a cross-section of
the entire age and sex spectrum, including many children, apparently a
more inclusive funeral ritual than had been normal in EBA and earlier
MBA mortuary ceremonies in the steppes. On the other hand, most
Sintashta cemeteries did not contain enough graves to account for more
than a small segment of the population of the associated walled settle-
ments. The Sintashta citadel included about fifty to sixty structures, and its
associated cemeteries had just sixty-six graves, most of them the graves of
children. If the settlement contained 250 people for six generations (150
years), it should have generated more than fifteen hundred graves. Only a
few exceptional families were given funerals in Sintashta cemeteries, but
the entire family, including children, was honored in this way. This privi-
lege, like the sacrifice of horses and chariots, was not one that everyone
could claim. Horses, chariots, weapons, and multiple animal sacrifices iden-
tified the graves of the Sintashta chiefs.

The funeral sacrifices of the Simtashta culture are a critical link between
archaeology and history. They closely resembled the rituals described in
the Rig Veda, the oldest text preserved in an Indo-Iranian language.

Sintashta and the Origins of the Aryans

The oldest texts in Old Indie are the “family books,” books 2 through 7, of
the Rig Veda (RV). These hymns and prayers were compiled into “books”
or mandalas about 1500-1300 BCE, but many had been composed earlier.
The oldest parts of the Avesta (AV), the Gathas, the oldest texts in Ira-
nian, were composed by Zarathustra probably about 1200-1000 BCE.
The undocumented language that was the parent of both, common Indo-
Iranian, must be dated well before 1500 BCE, because, by this date, Old
Indie had already appeared in the documents of the Mitanni in North
Syria (see chapter 3). Common Indo-Iranian probably was spoken during
the Sintashta period, 2100-1800 BCE. Archaic Old Indie probably
emerged as a separate tongue from archaic Iranian about 1800-1600 BCE
(see chapter 16). The RV and AV agreed that the essence of their shared
parental Indo-Iranian identity was linguistic and ritual, not racial. If a
person sacrificed to the right gods in the right way using the correct forms
of the traditional hymns and poems, that person was an Aryan. 45 Other-

Chariot Warriors 409

wise the individual was a Dasyu , again not a racial or ethnic label but a
ritual and linguistic one — a person who interrupted the cycle ot giving
between gods and humans, and therefore a person who threatened cosmic
order, r’ta (RV) or ala (AV). Rituals performed in the right words were the

core of being an Aryan. ,

Similarities between the rituals excavated at Sintashta and Arkaim and
those described later in the RV have solved, for many, the problem ot
Indo-Iranian origins. 46 The parallels include a reference in RV 10.18 to a
kurgan (“let them . . . bury death in this hill”), a roofed burial chamber
supported with posts (“let the fathers hold up this pillar for you”), and
with shored walls (“I shore up the earth all around you; let me not injure
vou as I lay down this clod of earth”). This is a precise description of
Sintashta and Potapovka-Filatovka grave pits, which had wooden plank
roofs supported by timber posts and plank shoring walls. The horse sacri-
fice at a royal funeral is described in RV 1.162: “Keep the limbs undam-
aged and place them in the proper pattern. Cut them apart, calling out
piece by piece.” The horse sacrifices in Sintashta, Potapovka, and Filatovka
graves match this description, with the lower legs of horses carefully cut
apart at the joints and placed in and over the grave. The preference for
horses as sacrificial animals in Sintashta funeral rituals, a species choice
setting Sintashta apart from earlier steppe cultures, was again paralleled
in the RV Another verse in the same hymn read: “Those who see that the
racehorse is cooked, who say, ‘It smells good! Take it away!’ and who wait
for the doling out of the flesh of the charger— let their approval encourage
us ” These lines describe the public feasting that surrounded the tuneral o
an important person, exactly like the feasting implied by head-and-hoof
deposits of horses, cattle, goats, and sheep in Sintashta graves that would
have yielded hundreds or even thousands of kilos of meat. In RV 5.85,
Varuna released the rain by overturning a pot: “ Varuna has poured out the
cask turning its mouth downward. With it the king of the whole universe
waters the sod.” In Sacrificial Deposit 1 at Sintashta an overturned pot
was placed between two rows of sacrificed animals— in a ritual possibly
associated with the construction of the enormous Bolshoi Kurgan. ' fi-
nally, the RV eloquently documents the importance of the poetry and
speech making that accompanied all these events. “Let us speak great
words as men of power in the sacrificial gathering” was the standard clos-
ing attached repeatedly to several different hymns (RV 2.12, 2.23, 2.28) in
one of the “family books.” These public performances played an important
role in attracting and converting celebrants to the Indo-Iranian ritual sys-
tem and language.

4io Chapter /j

Chariot Warriors 411

The explosion of Sintashta innovations in rituals, politics, and warfare
had a long-lasting impact on the later cultures of the Eurasian steppes.
This is another reason why the Sintashta culture is the best and clearest
candidate for the crucible of Indo-Iranian identity and language. Both the
Srubnaya and the Andronovo horizons, the principal cultural groups of
the Late Bronze Age in the Eurasian steppes (see chapter 16), grew from
origins in the Potapovka-Sintashta complex.

A Srubnaya site excavated by this author contained surprising evidence
for one more parallel between Indo-Iranian (and perhaps even Proto-
Indo-European) ritual and archaeological evidence in the steppes: the
midwinter New Years sacrifice and initiation ceremony, held on the win-
ter solstice. Many Indo-European myths and rituals contained references
to this event. One of its functions was to initiate young men into the war-
rior category ( Mdnnerbunde , korios ), and its principal symbol was the dog
or wolf. Dogs represented death; multiple dogs or a multi-headed dog
(< Cerberus , Saranyu) guarded the entrance to the Afterworld. At initiation,
death came to both the old year and boyhood identities, and as boys be-
came warriors they would feed the dogs of death. In the RV the oath
brotherhood of warriors that performed sacrifices at midwinter were called
the Vratyas, who also were called dog-priests. The ceremonies associated
with them featured many contests, including poetry recitation and chariot
races. 48

At the Srubnaya settlement of Krasnosamarskoe (Krasno-sa-MAR-
sko-yeh) in the Samara River valley, we found the remains of an LBA
midwinter dog sacrifice, a remarkable parallel to the reconstructed mid-
winter New Year ritual, dated about 1750 BCE. The dogs were butchered
only at midwinter, many of them near the winter solstice, whereas the
cattle and sheep at this site were butchered throughout the year. Dogs ac-
counted for 40% of all the animal bones from the site. At least eighteen
dogs were butchered, probably more. Nerissa Russell’s studies showed that
each dog head was burned and then carefully chopped into ten to twelve
small, neat, almost identical segments with axe blows. The postcranial re-
mains were not chopped into ritually standardized little pieces, and none
of the cattle or sheep was butchered like this. The excavated structure at
Krasnosamarskoe probably was the place where the dog remains from a
midwinter sacrifice were discarded after the event. They were found in an
archaeological context assigned to the early Srubnaya culture, but early
Srubnaya was a direct outgrowth from Potapovka and Abashevo, the same
circle as Sintashta, and nearly the same date. Krasnosamarskoe shows that
midwinter dog sacrifices were practiced in the middle Volga steppes, as in

the dog-priest initiation rituals described in the RV. Although such direct
evidence for midwinter dog rituals has not yet been recognized in Sintashta
settlements, many individuals buried in Sintashta graves wore necklaces of
dog canine teeth. Nineteen dog canine pendants were found in a single
collective grave with eight youths — probably of initiation age under a
Sintashta kurgan at Kammenyi Ambar 5, kurgan 4, grave 2.

In many small ways the cultures between the upper Don and Tobol riv-
ers in the northern steppes showed a common kinship with the Aryans ot
the Rig Veda and Avesta. Between 2100 and 1800 BCE they invented the
chariot, organized themselves into stronghold-based chiefdoms, armed
themselves with new kinds of weapons, created a new style of funeral ritu-
als that involved spectacular public displays of wealth and generosity, and
began to mine and produce metals on a scale previously unimagined in the
steppes. Their actions reverberated across the Eurasian continent. The
northern forest frontier began to dissolve east of the Urals as it had earlier
west of the Urals; metallurgy and some aspects of Sintashta settlement
designs spread north into the Siberian forests. Chariotry spread west
through the Ukrainian steppe MVK culture into southeastern Europe s
Monteoru (phase Icl-Ib), Vatin, and Otomani cultures, perhaps with the
satim dialects that later popped up in Armenian, Albanian, and Phrygian,
all of which are thought to have evolved in southeastern Europe. (Pre-
Greek must have departed before this, as it did not share in the satsm in-
novations.) And the Ural frontier was finally broken— herding economies
spread eastward across the steppes. With them went the eastern daughters
of Sintashta, the offspring who would later emerge into history as the Ira-
nian and Vedic Aryans. These eastern and southern connections finally
brought northern steppe cultures into face-to-face contact with the old
civilizations of Asia.

Chapter Sixteen

The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes

Between about 2300 and 2000 BCE the sinews of trade and conquest
began to pull the far-flung pieces of the ancient world together into a sin-
gle interacting system. The mainspring that drove inter-regional trade was
the voracious demand of the Asiatic cities for metal, gems, ornamental
stones, exotic woods, leather goods, animals, slaves, and power. Partici-
pants gained access to and control over knowledge of the urban centers
and their power-attracting abilities — a source of social prestige in most
societies. 1 Ultimately, whether through cultural means of emulation and
resistance or political means of treaty and alliance, a variety of regional
centers linked their fortunes to those of the paramount cities of the Near
East, Iran, and South Asia. Regional centers in turn extended their influ-
ence outward, partly in a search for raw materials for trade, and partly to
feed their own internal appetites for power. On the edges of this expand-
ing, uncoordinated system of consumption and competition were tribal
cultures that probably had little awareness of its urban core, at least ini-
tially (figures 16.1 and 16.2). But eventually they were drawn in. By 1500
BCE chariot-driving mercenaries not too far removed from the Eurasian
steppes, speaking an Old Indie language, created the Mitanni dynasty in
northern Syria in the heart of the urban Near East. 2

How did tribal chiefs from the steppes intrude into the dynastic politics
of the Near East? Where else did they go? To understand the crucial role
that Eurasian steppe cultures played in the knitting together of the an-
cient world during the Bronze Age, we should begin in the heartland of
cities, where the demand for raw materials was greatest.

Bronze Age Empires and the Horse Trade

About 2350 BCE Sargon of Akkad conquered and united the feuding
kingdoms of Mesopotamia and northern Syria into a single super-state —

412

The Eurasian Steppes 413

Figure 16.1 Cultures of the steppes and the Asian civilizations between about
2200 and 1800 BCE, with the locations of proven Bronze Age mines in the

steppes and the Zeravshan valley.

the first time the world’s oldest cities were ruled by one king. The Akka-
dian state lasted about 170 years. It had economic and political interests in
western and central Iran, leading to increased trade, occasionally backed
up by military expeditions. Images of horses, distinguished from asses and
onagers by their hanging manes, short ears, and bushy tails, began to ap-
pear in Near Eastern art during the Akkadian period, although they still
were rare and exotic animals. Some Akkadian seals had images ot men
riding equids in violent scenes of conflict (figure 16.3). Perhaps a few A -
kadian horses were acquired from the chiefs and princes of western Iran
known to the Akkadians as the Elamites.

Elamite was a non-Indo-European language, now extinct, then spoken
across western Iran. A string of walled cities and trade centers stood on
the Iranian plateau, revealed by excavations at Godm, Malyan, Konar
Sandal, Hissar, Shar-i-Sokhta, Shahdad, and other places. Malyan, the
ancient city of Anshan, the largest city on the plateau, certainly was an

\zaman K a[ nab 4
n.L'l w""

x^Tugai Sarazrrr

Gonur X. •Die

Anau

Namazga T(

Short uqail

6har-i : Sokhta

Makran Desert

414 Chapter 16

Elamite city allied to the Elamite king in Susa. Some of the other brick-
built towns, almost all of them smaller than Malyan, were part of an alli-
ance called Shimashki, located north of Malyan and south of the Caspian
Sea. Among the fifty-nine personal names recorded in the Shimashki al-
liance, only twelve can be classified as Elamite; the others are from un-
known non-Indo-European languages. East of the Iranian plateau, the
Harappan civilization of Indo-Pakistan, centered in huge mudbrick cities
on the Indus River, used its own script to record a language that has not
been definitively deciphered but might have been related to modern Dra-
vidian. The Harappan cities exported precious stones, tropical woods, and
metals westward on ships that sailed up the Persian Gulf, through a chain

Figure 16.2 Civilizations of Mesopotamia, Iran, Central Asia, and the Indus
valley about 2200-1800 BCE.

Os X

r, N

V MARGIANA

Dashly 3

B ACT R I A

Nishapur

Kavir Desert

SHIMASHKI

mARAPPA

Tie Eurasian Steppes 415

Figure 16.3 Early images of men riding equids in the Near
East and Central Asia: {top) Akkadian seal impression from
Kish, 2350-2200 BCE (after Buchanan 1966); {middle) seal
impression of the BMAC from a looted grave in Afghanistan,
2100-1800 BCE (after Sarianidi 1986); {bottom) Ur III seal
impression of Abbakalla, animal disburser for king Shu-Sin,
2050-2040 BCE (after Owen 1991).

4i6 Chapter 16

of coastal kingdoms scattered from Oman to Kuwait. Harappa probably
was the country referred to as “Melukkha” in the Mesopotamian cunei-
form records. 3

Akkadian armies and trade networks reached far and wide, but inside
Akkad was an enemy it could not conquer with arms: crop failure. During
the Akkadian era the climate became cooler and drier, and the agricultural
economy of the empire suffered. Harvey Weiss of Yale has argued that
some northern Akkadian cities were entirely abandoned, and their popula-
tions might have moved south into the irrigated floodplains of southern
Mesopotamia. 4 The Gutians, a coalition of chiefs from the western Iranian
uplands (perhaps Azerbaijan?) defeated the Akkadian army and overran
the city of Akkad in 2170 BCE. Its ruins have never been found.

About 2100 BCE the first king of the Third Dynasty of Ur, even then
an ancient Sumerian city in what is now southern Iraq, expelled the
Gutians and reestablished the power of southern Mesopotamia. The brief
Ur III period, 2100-2000 BCE, was the last time that Sumerian, the lan-
guage of the first cities, was a language of royal administration. A century
of bitter wars erupted between the Sumerian Ur III kings and the Elamite
city-states of the Iranian plateau, occasionally interrupted by negotiations
and marriage exchanges. King Shu-Sin of Ur bragged that he conquered a
path across Elam and through Shimashki until his armies finally were
stopped only by the Caspian Sea.

During this period of struggle and empire, 2100-2000 BCE, the bones
of horses appeared for the first time at important sites on the Iranian pla-
teau such as the large city of Malyan in Fars and the fortified administra-
tive center at Godin Tepe in western Iran. Bit wear made with a hard bit,
probably metal, appeared on the teeth of some of the equids (both mules
and horses) from Malyan. Excavated by Bill Sumner and brought by
Mindy Zeder to the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural
History in Washington, D.C. these teeth were the first archaeological
specimens that we examined when we started our bit wear project in 1985.
Now we know what then we only suspected: the horses and mules of the
Kaftari phase at Malyan were bitted with hard bits. Bits were a new tech-
nology for controlling equids in Iran, different from the lip- and nose-
rings that had appeared before this in Mesopotamian works of art. Of
course bits and bit-wear were very old in the steppes by 2000 BCE. 5

Horses also appeared in significant numbers in the cities of Mesopota-
mia for the first time during the Ur III period; this was when the word for
horse first appeared in written records. It meant “ass of the mountains,”
showing that horses were flowing into Mesopotamia from western Iran

The Eurasian Steppes 417

and eastern Anatolia. The Ur III kings fed horses to lions for exotic enter-
tainment. They did not use horse-drawn chariots, which had not yet ap-
peared in Near Eastern warfare. But they did have solid-wheeled battle
wagons and battle carts armed with javelins, pulled by teams of their
smaller native equids — asses, which were manageable but small, and ona-
gers or hemiones, which were almost untamable but larger. Ass-onager
hybrids probably pulled Sumerian battle carts and battle wagons. Horses
could have been used initially as breeding stock to make a larger, stronger
ass-horse hybrid — a mule. Mules were bitted at Malyan.

The Sumerians recognized in horses an arched-neck pride that asses
and onagers simply did not possess. King Shulgi compared himself in one
inscription to “a horse of the highway that swishes his tail.” We are not
sure exactly what horses were doing on Ur III highways, but a seal impres-
sion of one Abbakalla, the royal animal disburser for king Shu-Sin, showed
a man riding a galloping equid that looks like a horse (see figure 16. 3), 6
Ceramic figurines of the same age showed humans astride schematic ani-
mals that have equine proportions; and ceramic plaques dated at the time
of Ur III or just afterward showed men astride equids that probably were
horses, some riding in awkward poses on the rump and others in more
natural forward seats. No Ur III images showed a chariot, so the first clear
images of horses in Mesopotamia show men riding them.'

About 2000 BCE an Elamite and Shimashki alliance defeated the last of
the Ur III kings, Ibbi-Sin, and dragged him to Elam in chains. After this
stunning event the kings of Elam and Shimashki played a controlling role
in Mesopotamian politics for several centuries. Between 2000 and 1700
BCE the power, independence, and wealth of the Old Elamite (Malyan)
and Shimashkian (Hissar? Godin?) overlords of the Iranian plateau was at
its height. The treaties they negotiated for the Ur III wars were sealed by
gifts and trade agreements that channeled lapis lazuli, carved steatite ves-
sels, copper, tin, and horses from one prince to another. The Sintashta cul-
ture appeared at just the same time, but showed up 2000 km to the north in
the remote grasslands of the Ural-Tobol steppes. The metal trade and the
horse trade might have tied the two worlds together. Could the Elamite
defeat of Ibbi-Sin have been aided by chariot-driving Sintashta mercenaries
from the steppes? It is possible. Vehicles like chariots, with two spoked
wheels and a standing driver, but guided by equids with lip- or nose-rings,
began to appear on seal images in Anatolia just after the defeat of Ibbi-Sin.
They were not yet common, but that was about to change.

The metal trade might have provided the initial incentive for prospectors
to explore across the Central Asian deserts that had previously separated

4 J $ Chapter 16

tlie northern Eurasian steppe cultures from those of Iran. Vast amounts of
metal were demanded by Near Eastern merchants during the heyday of the
Id Elamite kings. Zimri-Lim, king of the powerful city-state of Mari in
northern Syria between 1776 and 1761 BCE, distributed gifts totaling
more than 410 kg (905 lb) of tin-not bronze, but tin-to his allies during
a single tour in his eighth year. Zimri-Lim also was chided by an adviser
tor riding a horse in public, an activity still considered insulting to the
honor of an Assyrian king: 8

May my lord honor his kingship. You may be the king of the Hane-
ans, but you are also the king of the Akkadians. May my Lord not
ride horses; (instead) let him ride either a chariot or kudanu-mi le so
that he would honor his kingship.

Zimri-Lim’s advisers accepted the fact that kings could ride in chariots—
ear Eastern monarchs had by then ridden in wheeled vehicles of other
kinds for more than a thousand years. But only rude barbarians actually
rode on the backs of the large, sweaty, smelly animals that pulled them,
orses, in Zimri-Lim s day, were still exotic animals associated with crude

A Steady SUpply of horses first began between 2100 and 2000
BCt. Chariots appeared across the Near East after 2000 BCE. How?

The Tin Trade and the Gateway to the North

Tin was the most important trade commodity in the Bronze Age Near
East In the palace records of Mari it was said to be worth ten times its
weight m silver. A copper-tin alloy was easier for the metal smith to cast
and .t made a harder, lighter-colored metal than either pure copper or ar-
senical bronze, the older alternatives. But the source of Near Eastern tin
remains an enigma. Large tin deposits existed in England and Malaysia
but these places were far beyond the reach of Near Eastern traders in the
Bronze Age. There were small tin deposits in western Serbia-and a scat-
ter of Old European copper objects from the Danube valley contained el-
evated tin perhaps derived from this source-but no ancient mines have
been found there. Ancient mines in eastern Anatolia near Goltepe might
have supplied a trickle of tin before 2000 BCE, but their proven tin con-
tent is very low, and tin was imported at great cost to Anatolia from north-
ern Syria after 2000 BCE. It was imported into northern Syria from
somewhere far to the east. The letters of king Zimri-Lim of Mari said
flatly that he acquired his tin from Elam, through merchants at Malyan
(Anshan) and Susa. An inscription on a statue of Gudea of Lagash, ca.

The Eurasian Steppes 419

2100 BCE, was thought to refer to the “tin of Melukkha implying that
tin came up the Arabian Gulf in ships sent by Harappan merchants; but
the passage might have been mistranslated. Intentional tin-bronze alloys
occurred in about 30% of the objects tested from the Indus-valley cities of
Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, although most had such a low tin content
(70% of them had only 1% tin, 99% copper) that it seems the best recipe
for tin bronze (8-12% tin, 92-88% copper) was not yet known in Harappa.
Still, “Melukkha” could have been one source of Mesopotamian tin. Tin-
bronzes have been found in sites in Oman, at the entrance to the Arabian
Gulf, in association with imported pottery and beads from Harappa and
bone combs and seals made in Bactria. Oman had no tin of its own but
could have been a coastal port and trans-shipment point for tin that came
from the Indus valley. 9

Where were the tin mines? Could the tin exported by the Elamite kings
and by Harappan merchants have come from the same sources? Quite
possibly. The most probable sources were in western and northern Af-
ghanistan, where tin ore has been found by modern mineral surveyors,
although no ancient mines have been found there, and also in the Zer-
avshan River valley, where the oldest tin mines in the ancient world have
been found near the site of Sarazm. Sarazm also was the portal through
which horses, chariots, and steppe cultures first arrived at the edges of
Central Asia.

Sarazm was founded before 3500 BCE (4880±30 BP, 4940±30 BP for
phase I) as a northern colony of the Namazga I— II culture. The Namazga
home settlements (Namazga, Anau, Altyn-Depe, Geoksur) were farming
towns situated on alluvial fans where the rivers that flowed off the Iranian
plateau emerged into the Central Asian deserts. Perhaps the lure that en-
ticed Namazga farmers to venture north across the Kara Kum desert to
Sarazm was the turquoise that outcropped in the desert near the lower
Zeravshan River, a source they could have learned about from Kelteminar
foragers. Sarazm probably was founded as a collection point for turquoise.
It was situated on the middle Zeravshan more than 100 km upstream
from the turquoise deposits at an elevation where the valley was lush and
green and crops could be grown. It grew to a large town, eventually cover-
ing more than 30 ha (74 acres). Its people were buried with ornaments of
turquoise, carnelian, silver, copper, and lapis lazuli. Late Kelteminar pot-
tery was found at Sarazm in its phase II, dated about 3000-2600 BCE
(4230±40BP), and turquoise workshops have been found in the late
Kelteminar camps of Kaptarnikum and Lyavlyakan in the desert near the
lower Zeravshan. Turquoise from the Zeravshan and from a second source

420 Chapter 16

near Nishapur in northeastern Iran was traded into Mesopotamia, the
Indus valley, and perhaps even to Maikop (the Maikop chieftain was bur-
ied with a necklace of turquoise beads). But the Zeravshan also contained
polymetallic deposits of copper, lead, silver — and tin.

Oddly, no tin has been found at Sarazm itself. Crucibles, slag, and
smelting furnaces appeared at Sarazm at least as early as the phase III
settlement (radiocarbon dated 2400-2000 BCE), probably for processing
the rich copper deposits in the Zeravshan valley. Sarazm III yielded a va-
riety of copper knives, daggers, mirrors, fishhooks, awls, and broad-headed
pins. Most were made of pure copper, but a few objects contained 1.8-
2.7% arsenic, probably an intentional arsenical bronze. Tin-bronzes began
to appear in small amounts in the Kopet Dag home region, in Altyn-Depe
and Namazga, during the Namazga IV period, equivalent to late Sarazm
II and III. A small amount of tin, perhaps just placer minerals retrieved
from the river, probably came from the Zeravshan before 2000 BCE, even
if we cannot see it at Sarazm. 10

Tlie tin mines of the Zeravshan River valley were found and investi-
gated by N. Boroffka and H. Parzinger between 1997 and 1999." Two tin
mines with Bronze Age workings were excavated. The largest was in
the desert on the lower Zeravshan at Karnab (Uzbekistan), about 170 km
west of Sarazm, exploiting cassiterite ores with a moderate tin content —
probably ordinarily about 3%, although some samples yielded as much as
22% tin. The pottery and radiocarbon dates show that the Karnab mine
was worked by people from the northern steppes, connected with the An-
dronovo horizon (see below). Dates ranged from 1900 to 1300 BCE (the
oldest was Bln 5127, 3476 ±32 BP, or 1900-1750 BCE; see table 16.1). A
few pieces of Namazga V/VI pottery were found in the Andronovo min-
ing camp at Karnab. The other mining complex was at Mushiston in the
upper Zeravshan (Tajikistan), just 40 km east of Sarazm, working stan-
nite, cassiterite and copper ores with a very high tin content (maximum
34%). Andronovo miners also left their pottery at Mushiston, where wood
beams produced radiocarbon dates as old as Karnab. Sarazm probably was
abandoned when these Andronovo mining operations began. Whether
the Zeravshan tin mines were worked before the steppe cultures arrived is
unknown.

Sarazm probably was abandoned around 2000 BCE, just at the Namazga
V/VI transition. On the lower Zeravshan, the smaller villages of the Za-
man Baba culture probably were abandoned about the same time as
Sarazm. 12 The Zaman Baba culture had established small villages of pit-
houses supported by irrigation agriculture in the large oasis in the lower

The Eurasian Steppes 421

Zeravshan delta just a couple of centuries earlier. Zaman Baba and Sarazm
were abandoned when people from the northern steppes arrived in the
Zeravshan. 13

Sarazm exported both copper and turquoise southward during the Ak-
kadian and Ur III periods. Could it have pulled steppe copper miners and
horse traders into the chain of supply for the urban trade? Could that ex-
plain the sudden intensification of copper production in Sintashta settle-
ments and the simultaneous appearance of horses in Iran and Mesopotamia
beginning about 2100 BCE? The answer lies among the ruins of walled
cities in Central Asia south of Sarazm, cities that interacted with the cul-
tures of the northern steppes before the Andronovo tin miners appeared
on the Zeravshan frontier.

The Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex

Around 2100 BCE a substantial population colonized the Murgab River
delta north of the Iranian plateau. The Murgab River flowed down from
the mountains of western Afghanistan, snaked across 180 km of desert,
then fanned out into the sands, dropping deep loads of silt and creating a
fertile island of vegetation about 80 by 100 km in size. This was Margiana,
a region that quickly became and remained one of the richest oases in
Central Asia. The immigrants built new walled towns, temples, and pal-
aces (Gonur, Togolok) on virgin soil during the late Namazga V period, at
the end of the regional Middle Bronze Age (figure 16.4). They might have
been escaping from the military conflicts that raged periodically across
the Iranian plateau, or they might have relocated to a larger river system
with more reliable flows in a period of intensifying drought. Anthropo-
logical studies of their skeletons show that they came from the Iranian pla-
teau, and their pottery types seem to have been derived from the Namazga
V-type towns of the Kopet Dag. 14

The colonization phase in Margiana, 2100-2000 BCE, was followed by
a much richer period, 2000-1800 BCE, during Namazga VI, the begin-
ning of the regional Late Bronze Age. New walled towns now spread to
the upper Amu Darya valley, ancient Bactria, where Sapalli-Tepe, Dashly-
3, and Djarkutan were erected on virgin soil. The towns of Bactria and
Margiana shared a distinctive set of seal types, architectural styles, brick-
lined tomb types, and pottery. The LBA civilization of Bactria and Mar-
giana is called the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC).
The irrigated countryside was dominated by large towns surrounded by
thick yellow-brick walls with narrow gates and high corner towers. At the

422 Chapter 16

Table 16.1

Selected Radiocarbon Dates from Earlier Late Bronze Age Cultures in the Steppes
Lab Number BP Date Kurgan Grave Mean Intercept BCE BCE

1. Krasnosamarskoe kurgan cemetery IV, Samara oblast, LBA Pokrovka and Srubnaya

graves

AA37038

3490 ±57

kurgan 3

1

1859, 1847, 1772

1881-1740

AA37039

3411 ±46

kurgan 3

6

1731, 1727, 1686

1747-1631

AA37042

3594 ±45

kurgan 3

10

1931

1981-1880

AA37043

3416±57

kurgan 3

11

1733, 1724, 1688

1769-1623

AA37044

3407 ±46

kurgan 3

13

1670, 1668, 1632

1685-1529

AA37045

3407 ±46

kurgan 3

16

1730, 1685

1744-1631

AA37046

3545 ±65

kurgan 3

17

1883

1940-1766

AA37047

3425 ±52

kurgan 3

23

1735,1718,1693

1772-1671

2. Krasnosamarskoe setdement, Samara oblast

Structure floor and cultural level outside structure, Pokrovka and Srubnaya occupations

AA41022

3531 ±43

Square/quad

L5 2

level

3

1879, 1832, 1826, 1790

1899-1771

AA41023

3445 ±51

M5

1

7

1741

1871-1678

AA41024

3453 ±43

M6

3

7

1743

1867-1685

AA41025

3469 ±45

N3

3

7

1748

1874-1690

AA41026

3491 ±52

N4

2

6

1860,1846,1772

1879-1743

AA41027

3460 ±52

04

1

7

1745

1873-1685

AA41028

3450±57

04

2

5

1742

1874-1679

AA41029

3470 ±43

PI

4

6

1748

1783-1735

AA41030

3477±39

S2

3

4

1752

1785-1738

AA41031

3476 ±38

R1

2

5

1750

1875-1706

AA41032

3448±47

N2

2

4

1742

1858-1685

AA47790

3311±54

05

3

3

1598, 1567, 1530

1636-1518

AA47796

3416±59

Y2

2

4

1736, 1713, 1692

1857-1637

AA47797

3450±50

Y1

3

5

1742

1779-1681

Waterlogged Pokrovka artifacts from deep pit interpreted as a well inside the structure

AA47793

3615±41

M2

4

-276

1948

1984-1899

AA47794

3492 ±55

M2

4

-280

1860,1846,1773

1829-1742

AA47795

3550±54

M2

4

-300

1884

1946-1776

The Eurasian Steppes 423

Table 16.1 ( continued )

l a b Number BP Date Kurgan Grave Mean Intercept BCE BCE

Srubnaya and Pokrovka artifacts from eroded part of settlement on the lake bottom
AA47791 3494 ±56 Lake find 1 0 1862,1845,1774 1881-1742

AA47792 3492±55 Lake find 2 0 1860,1846,1773 1829-1742

Srubnaya herding camp at PD1 in the Peschanyi Dol valley

AA47798 3480±52 A 16 3 3 1758 1789-173 7

AA47799 3565 ±55 1 18 2 2 1889 1964-1872

3. Karnab mining camp, Zeravshan valley, Uzbekistan, Andronovo-Alakul occupation
Bln-5127 3476 ±32 1880-1740

Bln-141274 3280±40 1620-1510

Bln-141275 3170±50 1520-1400

Bln-5126 3130±44 1490-1310

1 4. Alakul-Andronovo settlements and kurgan graves

Alakul kurgan 15, grave 1

Le-924 3360 ±50 charcoal 1740-1530

Subbotino kurgan 17, grave 3

Le-1126 3460 ±50 wood 1880-1690

Subbotino kurgan 18, central grave

Le-1196 3000±50 wood 1680-1510

Tasty-Butak settlement

Rul-614 3550±65 wood, pit 14 2010-1770

Le-213 3190±80 wood, pit 11 1600-1320

center of the larger towns were walled palaces or citadels that contained
temples. The brick houses and streets of Djarkutan covered almost 100 ha,
commanded by a high-walled citadel about 100 by 100 m. Local lords
ruled from smaller strongholds such as Togolok 1, just .5 ha (1.2 acres) in
size but heavily walled with large corner turrets. Trade and crafts flour-
ished in the crowded houses and alleys of these Central Asian walled
towns and fortresses. Their rulers had relations with the civilizations of
Mesopotamia, Elam, Harappa, and the Arabian Gulf.

Between 2000 and 1800 BCE, BMAC styles and exported objects
(notably small jars made of carved steatite) appeared in many sites and

424 Chapter 16

NORTH

GONUR

DEPE

DASHLY 3

SOUTH

TOGOLOK 21

100m

3 BMAC CITADELS

Figure 16.4 Three walled towns of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological
Complex (BMAC) in Central Asia, 2100-1800 BCE. Wall foundations of
the central circular citadel/temple and town at Dashly 3, Bactria (after Sari-
anidi 1977, figure 13); wall foundations at Gonur Depe, Margiana (combined
from Hiebert 1994; and Sarianidi 1995); wall foundations and artists recon-
struction of Togolok 21, Margiana (after Hiebert 1994; and Sarianidi 1987).

The Eurasian Steppes 425

cemeteries across the Iranian plateau. Crested axes like those of the
BMAC appeared at Shadad and other sites in eastern and central Iran.
A cemetery at Mehrgarh VIII in Baluchistan, on the border between the
Harappan and Elamite civilizations, contained so many BMAC arti-
facts that it suggests an actual movement of BMAC people into Baluch-
istan. BMAC-style sealings, ivory combs, steatite vessels, and pottery
goblets appeared in the Arabian Gulf from Umm-al-Nar on the Oman
peninsula up the Arabian coast to Falaika island in Kuwait. Beadmakers
in BMAC towns used shells obtained from both the Indian Ocean ( En -
gina medicaria , Lambis truncate sebae) and the Mediterranean Sea ( Nas -
sarius gibbosulus ), as well as steatite, alabaster, lapis lazuli, turquoise,
silver, and gold. 15

The metalsmiths of the BMAC made beautiful objects of bronze, lead,
silver, and gold. They cast delicate metal figures by the lost-wax process,
which made it possible to cast very detailed metal objects. They made crested
bronze shaft-hole axes with distinctive down-curved blades, tanged dag-
gers, mirrors, pins decorated with cast animal and human figures, and a
variety of distinctive metal compartmented seals (figure 16.5). The metals
used in the first colonization period, late Namazga V, were unalloyed cop-
per, arsenical bronze, and a copper-lead alloy with up to 8-10% lead.

About 2000 BCE, during the Namazga VI/BMAC period, tin-bronze
suddenly appeared prominently in sites of the BMAC. Tin-bronzes were
common at two BMAC sites, Sapalli and Djarkutan, reaching more than
50% of objects, although at neighboring Dashly-3, also in Bactria, tin-
bronzes were just 9% of metal objects. Tin-bronzes were rare in Margiana
(less than 10% of metal objects at Gonur, none at all at Togolok). Tin-
bronze was abundant only in Bactria, closer to the Zeravshan. It looks like
the tin mines of the Zeravshan were established or greatly expanded at the
beginning of the mature BMAC period, about 2000 BCE. 16

There were no wild horses in Central Asia. The native equids were ona-
gers. Wild horses had not previously strayed south of what is today central
Kazakhstan. Any horses found in BMAC sites must have been traded in
from the steppes far off to the north. The animal bones discarded in and
near BMAC settlements contained no horse bones. Hunters occasionally
killed wild onagers but not horses. Most of the bones recovered from the
settlement trash deposits were from sheep or goats. Asian zebu cattle and
domesticated Bactrian camels also appeared. They were shown pulling
wagons and carts in BMAC artwork. Small funeral wagons with solid
wooden-plank wheels and bronze-studded tires were buried in royal graves
associated with the first building phase, dated about 2100—2000 BCE, at

The Eurasian Steppes 427

Gonur in Margiana (called Gonur North, because the oldest phase was
found at the northern end of the modern ruins).

In these graves at Gonur, associated with the early settlement of Gonur
North, one horse was found. A brick-lined grave pit contained the contorted
bodies of ten adult humans who were apparently killed in the grave itself,
one of whom fell across a small funeral wagon with solid wooden wheels.
The grave also contained a whole dog, a whole camel, and the decapitated
body of a horse foal (the reverse of an Aryan horse sacrifice). This grave is
thought to have been a sacrificial offering that accompanied a nearby “royal”
tomb. The royal tomb contained funeral gifts that included a bronze image
of a horse head, probably a pommel decoration on a wooden staff. Another
horse head image appeared as a decoration on a crested copper axe of the
BM AC type, unfortunately obtained on the art market and now housed in
the Louvre. Finally, a BMAC-stylc seal probably looted from a BMAC
cemetery in Bactria (Afghanistan) showed a man riding a galloping equid
that looks very much like a horse (see figure 16.3). The design was similar to
the contemporary galloping-horse-and-rider image on the Ur III seal of
Abbakalla, dated 2040-2050 BCE. Both seals showed a galloping horse, a
rider with a hair-knot on the back of his head, and a man walking.

These finds suggest that horses began to appear in Central Asia about
2100-2000 BCE but never were used for food. They appeared only as
decorative symbols on high-status objects and, in one case, in a funeral
sacrifice. Given their simultaneous appearance across Iran and Mesopota-
mia, and the position of BMAC between the steppes and the southern
civilizations, horses were probably a trade commodity. After chariots were
introduced to the princes of the BMAC, Iran, and the Near East around
2000-1900 BCE, the demand for horses could easily have been on the
order of tens of thousands of animals annually. 1 '

Steppe Inunigrants in Central Asia

Fred Hiebert’s excavations at the walled town of Gonur North in Margi-
ana, dated 2100-2000 BCE, turned up a few sherds of strange pottery,

Figure 16.5 {continued) crested shaft-hole axes from the art market, probably
from BMAC sites, with a possible horse-head on the lower one, after Aruz
1998, figure 24; and Amiet 1986, figure 167; {center right) a crested axe with eye
amulet, and a copper mirror and dagger excavated from Gonur North, after
Hiebert 1994; and Sarianidi 1995, figure 22; {bottom) ceramic vessel shapes
from Gonur, after Hiebert 1994.

Figure 16.5 Artifacts of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, 2100—
1800 BCE: {top left) a sample of BMAC stamp seals, adapted after Salvatori
2000, and Hiebert 1994; {top center) cast silver pin head from Gonur North
showing a goddess in a ritual dress, after Klochkov 1998, figure 3; {top right)
ceramic female figurines from Gonur North, after Hiebert 1994; {center left)

428 Chapter 16

unlike any other pottery at Gonur. It was made with a paddle-and-anvil
technique on a cloth-lined form — the clay was pounded over an upright
cloth-covered pot to make the basic shape, and then was removed and
finished. This is how Sintashta pottery was made. These strange sherds
were imported from the steppe. At this stage (equivalent to early Sintashta)
there was very little steppe pottery at Gonur, but it was there, at the same
time a horse foal was thrown into a sacrificial pit in the Gonur North
cemetery. Another possible trace of this early phase of contact were
“Abashevo-like” pottery sherds decorated with horizontal channels, found
at the tin miners’ camp at Karnab on the lower Zeravshan. Late Abashevo
was contemporary with Sintashta.

During the classic phase of the BMAC, 2000-1800 BCE, contact
with steppe people became much more visible. Steppe pots were brought
into the rural stronghold at Togolok 1 in Margiana, inside the larger
palace/temple at Togolok 21, inside the central citadel at Gonur South,
and inside the walled palace/temple at Djarkutan in Bactria (figure 16.6).
These sherds were clearly from steppe cultures. Similar designs can be
found on Sintashta pots at Krivoe Ozero (k. 9, gr. 3; k. 10, gr. 13) but
were more common on pottery of early Andronovo (Alakul variant)
type, dated after 1900-1800 BCE — pottery like that used by the An-
dronovo miners at Karnab. Although the amount of steppe pottery in
classic BMAC sites is small, it is widespread, and there is no doubt that
it derived from northern steppe cultures. In these contexts, dated 2000-
1800 BCE, the most likely steppe sources were the Petrovka culture at
Tugai or the first Alakul-Andronovo tin miners at Karnab, both located
in the Zeravshan valley. 18

The Petrovka settlement at Tugai appeared just 27 km downstream
(west) ot Sarazm, not far from the later site of Samarkand, the greatest
caravan trading city of medieval Central Asia. Perhaps Tugai had a
similar, if more modest, function in an early north-south trade network.
The Petrovka culture (see below) was an eastern offshoot of Sintashta.
The Petrovka people at Tugai constructed two copper-smelting ovens,
crucibles with copper slag, and at least one dwelling. Their pottery in-
cluded at least twenty-two pots made with the paddle-and-anvil tech-
nique on a cloth-lined form. Most of them were made of clay tempered
with crushed shell, the standard mixture for Petrovka potters, but two
were tempered with crushed talc/steatite minerals. Talc-tempered clays
were typical of Sintashta, Abashevo, and even forest-zone pottery of
Ural forager cultures, so these two pots probably were carried to the

i

The Eurasian Steppes 429

Figure 16.6 A whole steppe pot found inside the walls of the Gonur South
town, after Hiebert 1994; steppe sherds with zig-zag decoration found inside
the walls of Togolok 1, after Kuzmina 2003; and similar motifs on Sintashta
sherds from graves at Krivoe Ozero, Ural steppes, after Vinogradov 2003,
figures 39 and 74.

Zeravshan from the Ural steppes. The pottery shapes and impressed
designs were classic early Petrovka (figure 16.7). A substantial group of
Petrovka people apparently moved from the Ural-Ishim steppes to Tugai,
probably in wagons loaded with pottery and other possessions. They left
garbage middens with the bones of cattle, sheep, and goats, but they did
not eat horses — although their Petrovka relatives in the northern steppes
did. Tugai also contained sherds of wheel-made cups in red-polished and
black-polished fabrics typical of the latest phase at Sarazm (IV). The

domestic structure

The Eurasian Steppes 431

principal activity identified in the small excavated area was copper
smelting. 19

The steppe immigrants at Tugai brought chariots with them. A grave at
Zardcha-Khalifa 1 km east of Sarazm contained a male buried in a con-
tracted pose on his right side, head to the northwest, in a large oval pit,
3.2 m by 2.1 m, with the skeleton of a ram. 20 The grave gifts included
three wheel-made Namazga VI ceramic pots, typical of the wares made in
Bactrian sites of the BMAC such as Sappali and Dzharkutan; a trough-
spouted bronze vessel (typical of BMAC) and fragments of two others; a
pair of gold trumpet-shaped earrings; a gold button; a bronze straight-pin
with a small cast horse on one end; a stone pestle; two bronze bar bits with
looped ends; and two largely complete bone disc-shaped cheekpieces of
the Sintashta type, with fragments of two others (figure 16.8). The two
bronze bar bits are the oldest known metal bits anywhere. With the four
cheekpieces they suggest equipment for a chariot team. The cheekpieces
were a specific Sintashta type (the raised bump around the central hole is
the key typological detail), though disc-shaped studded cheekpieces also
appeared in many Petrovka graves. Stone pestles also frequently ap-
peared in Sintashta and Petrovka graves. The Zardcha-Khalifa grave
probably was that of an immigrant from the north who had acquired
many BMAC luxury objects. He was buried with the only known BM AC-
made pin with the figure of a horse — perhaps made just for him. The
Zardcha-Khalifa chief may have been a horse dealer. The Zeravshan val-
ley and the Ferghana valley just to the north might have become the breed-
ing ground at this time for the fine horses for which they were known in
later antiquity.

The fabric-impressed pottery and the sacrificed horse foal at Gonur
North and perhaps the Abashevo (?) sherds at Karnab represent the ex-
ploratory phase of contact and trade between the northern steppes and the
southern urban civilizations about 2100-2000 BCE, during the period
when the kings of Ur III still dominated Elam. Information and perhaps
even cult practices from the south flowed back to early Sintashta societies.
On the eastern frontier in Kazakhstan, where Petrovka was budding off
from Sintashta, the lure of the south prompted a migration across more

Figure 16. 7 The Petrovka settlement at Tugai on the Zeravshan River: {top)
plan of excavation; {center left) imported redware pottery like that of Sarazm
IV; {center right) two coarse ceramic crucibles from the metal-working area;
{bottom) Petrovka pottery. Adapted from Avanessova 1996.

The Eurasian Steppes 4 jj

Figure 16.8 Objects from the grave at Zardcha-Khalifa on the Zeravshan
River. The trough-spouted bronze vessel and ceramic pots are typical of the
BMAC, 2000-1800 BCE; the cast copper horse pin shows BMAC casting
methods; the bronze bar bits are the first ones dated this early; and the stone
pestle, trumpet-shaped earring, and bone cheekpieces are steppe types. After
Bobomulloev 1997, figures 2, 3, and 4.

than a thousand kilometers of hostile desert. The establishment of the
Petrovka metal-working colony at Tugai, probably around 1900 BCE, was
the beginning of the second phase, marked by the actual migration of
chariot-driving tribes from the north into Central Asia. Sarazm and the
irrigation-fed Zaman-Baba villages were abandoned about when the Petro-
vka miners arrived at Tugai. The steppe tribes quickly appropriated the ore
sources of the Zeravshan, and their horses and chariots might have made
it impossible for the men of Sarazm to defend themselves.

Central Asian Trade Goods in the Steppes

Did any BMAC products appear in Sintashta or Petrovka settlements?
Only a few hints of a return trade can be identified. One intriguing in-
novation was a new design motif, the stepped pyramid or crenellation.
Stepped pyramids or crenellations appeared on the pottery of Sintashta,
Potapovka, and Petrovka. The stepped pyramid was the basic element in
the decorative artwork on Namazga, Sarazm, and BMAC pottery, jew-
elry, metalwork, and even in a mural painted on the Proto-Elamite palace
wall at Malyan (figure 16.9, bottom). Repeated horizontally, the stepped
pyramid became a line of crenellated designs; repeated on four sides, it
became a stepped cross. This motif had not appeared in any earlier pottery
in the steppes, neither in the Bronze Age nor the Eneolithic. Charts of
design motifs are regularly published in Russian archaeological ceramic
studies. I have scanned these charts for years and have not found the
stepped pyramid in any assemblage earlier than Sintashta. Stepped pyra-
mids appeared for the first time on northern steppe pottery just when
northern steppe pottery first showed up in BMAC sites. It was seen first
on a small percentage (<5%) of Potapovka pottery on the middle Volga
(single vessels in Potapovka kurgans 1, 2, 3, and 5) and at about the same
frequency on Sintashta pottery in the Ural-Tobol steppes; later it became a
standard design element in Petrovka and Andronovo pottery (but not in
Srubnaya pottery, west of the Urals). Although no Sarazm or BMAC pot-
tery has been found in Sintashta contexts, the design could have been
conveyed to the northern steppes on textiles — perhaps the commodity
exchanged for northern metal. I would guess that Sintashta potters copied
the design from imported BMAC textiles.

There are other indications of contact. A lead wire made of two braided
strands was found among the metal objects in the Sintashta settlement of
Kuisak. Lead had never before appeared in the northern steppes as a pure
metal, whereas a single ingot of lead weighing 10 kg was found at Sarazm.

figure 16.9 Stepped pyramid or crenellation motifs on steppe pottery and on
Central Asian pottery: {top row and left pot in second row) Potapovka graves,
middle Volga region, 2100—1800 BCE, after Vasiliev, Kuznetsov, and Se-
menova 1994, figures 20 and 22; {middle row , remaining pots) Sintashta SII
cemetery, grave 1, after Gening, Zdanovich and Gening 1992, figure 172;
{bottom left) Sarazm, level II, 3000-2500 BCE, after Lyonnet 1996, figures 4
and 12; {bottom right) Altyn-Depe, excavation 1, burial 296, after Masson
1988, plate 27.

The Kuishak lead wire probably was an import from the Zeravshan. A la-
pis lazuli bead from Afghanistan was found at Sintashta. A Bactrian-
handled bronze mirror was found in a Sintashta grave at Krasnoe
Znamya.^ 1 Finally, the technique of lost-wax metal casting first appeared
in the north during the Sintashta period, in metal objects of Seima-Turbino

The Eurasian Steppes 433

type (described in more detail below). Lost-wax casting was familiar to
BMAC metalsmiths. Southern decorative motifs (stepped pyramids), raw
materials (lead and lapis lazuli), one mirror, and metal-working tech-
niques (lost-wax casting) appeared in the north just when northern pot-
tery, chariot-driving cheekpieces, bit wear, and horse bones appeared in
the south.

The sudden shift to large-scale copper production that began about 2100-
2000 BCE in the earliest Sintashta settlements must have been stimulated
by a sharp increase in demand. Central Asia is the most likely source. The
increase in metal production deeply affected the internal politics of northern
steppe societies, which quickly became accustomed to using and consuming
large quantities of bronze. Although the northern steppe producers probably
had direct contact with the Central Asian market only for a short time, in-
ternal demand in the steppes remained high throughout the LBA. Once the
metallurgical pump was primed, so to speak, it continued to flow. The prim-
ing happened because of contact with urban markets, but the flow after that
raised the usage of metal in the steppes and in the forest zone to the north,
starting an internal European cycle of exchange that would lead to a metal
boom in the Eurasian steppes after 2100 BCE.

After 1900 BCE a contact zone developed in the Zeravshan valley and
extended southward to include the central citadels in the BMAC towns.
In the Zeravshan, migrants from the northern steppes mixed with late
Kelteminar and BM AC-derived populations. The Old Indie dialects prob-
ably evolved and separated from the developing Iranian dialects in this
setting. To understand how the Zeravshan-Bactrian contact zone sepa-
rated itself from the northern steppes, we need to examine what happened
in the northern steppes after the end of the Sintashta culture.

The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes

The Srubnaya (or Timber-Grave) culture was the most important LBA
culture of the western steppes, from the Urals to the Dnieper (figure 16.10).
The Andronovo horizon was the primary LBA complex of the eastern
steppes, from the Urals to the Altai and the Tien Shan. Both grew from
the Potapovka-Sintashta complex between the middle Volga and the
Tobol. With the appearance of Srubnaya and Andronovo between about
1900 and 1800 BCE, for the first time in history a chain of broadly simi-
lar cultures extended from the edges of China to the frontiers of Eu-
rope. Innovations and raw materials began to move across the continent.
The steppe world was not just a conduit, it also became an innovating

The Eurasian Steppes 437

center, particularly in bronze metallurgy and chariot warfare. The chariot-
driving Shang kings of China and the Mycenaean princes of Greece,
contemporaries at opposite ends of the ancient world at about 1500 BCE,
shared a common technological debt to the LBA herders of the Eurasian
steppes.

The Srubnaya Culture: Herding and Gathering
in the Western Steppes

West of the Ural Mountains, the Potapovka and late Abashevo groups of
the middle Volga region developed into the Pokrovka complex, dated about
1900—1750 BCE. Pokrovka was a proto-Srubnaya phase that rapidly devel-
oped directly into the Srubnaya (or Timber-Grave) culture (1800—1200
BCE). Srubnaya material culture spread as far west as the Dnieper valley.
One of the most prominent features of the Srubnaya culture was the appear-
ance of hundreds of small settlement sites, most of them containing just a
few houses, across the northern steppe and the southern forest-steppe, from
the Urals to the Dnieper. Although settlements had reappeared in a few
places east of the Don River during the late Catacomb culture, 2400-2100
BCE, and were even more numerous in Ukraine west of the Don during the
Mnogovalikovaya (MVK) period (2100-1800 BCE), the Srubnaya period
was the first time since the Eneolithic that settlements appeared across the
entire northern steppe zone from the Dnieper to the southern Urals and
beyond into northern Kazakhstan.

The reason for this shift back to living in permanent homes is unclear.
Most Srubnaya settlements were not fortified or defended. Most were small
individual homesteads or extended family ranches rather than nucleated
villages. The herding pattern seems to have been localized rather than mi-
gratory. During the Samara Valley Project, in 1999-2001, we studied the
local Srubnaya herding pattern by excavating a series of Srubnaya herding
camps that extended up a tributary stream valley, Peschanyi Dol, from the
Srubnaya settlement at Barinovka, near the mouth of the valley on the
Samara (figure 16.11). The largest herding camps (PD1 and 2) were those
closest to the home settlement, within 4-6 km of Barinovka. Farther up-
stream the Srubnaya camps were smaller with fewer pottery sherds, and
beyond about 10-12 km upstream from Barinovka we found no LBA
herding camps at all, not even around the springs that fed the stream at its
source, where there was plenty of water and good pastures. So the herd-
ing system seems to have been localized, like the new residence pattern.

I

Figure 16.11 The Peschanyi Dol valley, a tributary of the Samara River, sur-
veyed to find ephemeral camps in 1995-96. PDl, 2, and 3, were Srubnaya
herding camps excavated in 2000. All numbered sites yielded at least one
Srubnaya ceramic sherd. Barinovka was a larger Srubnaya settlement tested in

The Eurasian Steppes 439

The Srubnaya economy in the middle Volga steppes does not seem to have
required long-distance migrations.

One traditional explanation for the settling-down phenomenon is that
this was when agriculture was widely adopted across the northern
steppes. 22 But this explanation certainly does not apply everywhere. At
the settlement of Krasnosamarskoe in the Samara River valley, where the
dog sacrifice was found (chapter 15), a Pokrovka component (radiocarbon
dated 1900-1800 BCE) and an early Srubnaya component (dated 1800-
1700 BCE) were stratified within a single structure. In the Srubnaya pe-
riod the structure probably was a well-house and woodshed where a variety
of domestic tasks were conducted and food garbage was buried in pits. It
was used during all seasons of the year. Anne Pike-Tay’s analysis of sea-
sonal bands in the roots of animal teeth established that the cattle and
sheep were butchered in all seasons. But there was no agriculture. Laura
Popova found no seeds, pollen, or phytoliths of cultivated cereals associ-
ated with the LBA occupation, only wild Chenopodium and Amaranthus
seeds. The skeletons of 192 adults from twelve Srubnaya cemeteries in the
Samara oblast were examined by Eileen Murray and A. Khokhlov. They
showed almost no dental decay. The complete absence of caries usually is
associated with a low-starch, low-carbohydrate diet, typical for foragers
and quite atypical for bread eaters (figure 16.12). The dental evidence con-
firmed the botanical evidence. Bread was not eaten much, if at all, in the
northern steppes.

In pits at Krasnosamarskoe we found an abundance of carbonized wild
seeds, including Chenopodium album and Amaranthus . Modern wild Cheno-
podium (also known as goosefoot) is a weed that grows in dense stands that
can produce seed yields in the range of 500— 1000 kg/ha, about the same as
einkorn wheat, which yields 645-835 kg/ha. 23 Amaranthus is equally pro-
lific. With meat and milk from cattle, sheep, and horses, this was a suffi-
cient diet. Although clear evidence of cereal agriculture has been found in
Srubnaya settlements west of the Don in Ukraine, it is possible that agri-
culture was much less important east of the Don than has often been as-
sumed. Herding and gathering was the basis for the northern steppe
economy in at least some regions east of the Don as late as the LBA.~ 4

Figure 16.11 (continued) 1996 but found to be badly disturbed by a historic
settlement. Author’s excavation. Bottom image is a Google Earth™ image,
© 2006 Terra Metrics, 2006 Europa Technologies.

44° Chapter 16

The Eurasian Steppes 441

Figure 16.12 Graph of the frequency of dental caries (cavities) in populations
with different kinds of food economies {right), in Scythian and Sarmatian cem-
eteries in Tuva {center), and in prehistoric populations in the Samara oblast,
middle Volga region {left six bars). Bread apparently was not part of the diet in
the Samara oblast. After Murphy 2003; and Murphy and Khokhlov 2001.

So if agriculture does not provide an answer, then why did people settle
down during the MBA/LBA transition in the northern steppes, includ-
ing the earlier episode at Sintashta? As explained in chapter 15, climate
change might have been the principal cause. A cool, arid climate affected
the Eurasian steppes between about 2500-2000 BCE. This was the same
event that struck Akkadian agriculture and weakened the Harappan
civilization. The late MBA/early LBA settling-down phenomenon, in-
cluding the earliest episodes at Sintashta and Arkaim, can be interpreted
as a way to maintain control over the richest winter forage areas for herds,
particularly if grazing animals were the principal source of food in an
economy that, in many regions, did not include agriculture. Early LBA
Krasnosamarskoe overlooked one of the largest marshes on the lower
Samara River.

Some permanent settlements also developed near copper mines. Cattle
forage was not the only critical resource in the northern steppes. Mining
and bronze working became important industries across the steppes dur-
ing the LBA. A vast Srubnaya mining center operated at Kargaly near
Orenburg in the South Urals, and other enormous copper mines operated
near Karaganda in central Kazakhstan. Smaller mining camps were estab-
lished at many small copper outcrops, like the Srubnaya mining camp at
Mikhailovka Ovsianka in the southern Samara oblast. 23

East of the Urals, Phase I: The Petrovka Culture

The first culture of the LBA east of the Urals was the Petrovka culture, an
eastern offshoot of Sintashta dated about 1900-1750 BCE. Petrovka was
so similar to Sintashta in its material culture and mortuary rituals that
many archaeologists (including me) have used the combined term Sintashta-
Petrovka to refer to both. But Petrovka ceramics show some distinctive
variations in shape and decoration, and are stratified above Sintashta de-
posits at several sites, so it is clear that Petrovka grew out of and was gen-
erally later than Sintashta. The oldest Petrovka sites, like the type site,
Petrovka II, were settlements on the Ishim River in the steppes of north-
ern Kazahstan (figure 16.13). The Petrovka culture probably absorbed
some people who had roots in the older post-Botai horse-centered cultures
of the Ishim steppes, like Sergeivka, but they were materially (and proba-
bly linguistically) almost invisible. Petrovka- style pottery then replaced
Sintashta ceramics at several Sintashta fortified sites, as at Ust ye, where the
Sintashta settlement was burned and replaced by a Petrovka settlement
built on a different plan. Petrovka graves were dug into older Sintashta
kurgans at Krivoe Ozero and Kamenny Ambar. 26

The settlement of Petrovka II was surrounded by a narrow ditch less
than 1 m deep, perhaps for drainage. The twenty-four large houses had
dug-out floors and measured from 6 by 10 m to about 8 by 18 m. They were
built close together on a terrace overlooking the floodplain, a nucleated vil-
lage pattern quite different from the scattered homesteads of the Srubnaya
culture. Petrovka II was reoccupied by people who made classic Andronovo-
horizon ceramics of both the Alakul and Federovo types, stratified above
the Petrovka layer, and the Andronovo town was succeeded by a “final-
LBA” settlement with Sargar ceramics. This stratified sequence made
Petrovka II an important yardstick for the LBA chronology of the Kazakh
steppes. Chariots continued to be buried in a few early Petrovka graves at
Berlyk II and Krivoe Ozero, and many bone disk-shaped cheekpieces have

Petrovka settlement plan

The Eurasian Steppes 44 J

come from Petrovka sites. During the Petrovka period, however, chariot
burials gradually ceased, the size and number of mortuary animal sacrifices
also declined, and large-scale Sintashta-typc fortifications were no longer
built around settlements in the northern steppes.

Petrovka settlements and kurgan cemeteries spread southward into the
arid steppes of central Kazkahstan, and from there to Tugai on the Zer-
avshan, more than 1,200 km south of central Kazakhstan. Petrovka prob-
ably also was in touch with the Okunevo culture in the western Altai, the
successor of late Afanasievo. The permanent nucleated settlements of the
Petrovka culture do not resemble the temporary camps of nomadic herd-
ers, so it is unlikely that the Petrovka economy depended on annual long-
distance migrations. Early historic nomads, who did not live in permanent
nucleated villages, wintered in the Syr Darya marshes and summered in
the north Kazakh steppes, a cycle of annual movements that brought them
to the doorstep of Central Asia civilizations each winter. But the Petrovka
economy seems to have been less nomadic. If the Petrovka people did not
engage in long-distance herd migrations, then their movement south to
the Zeravshan was not an accidental by-product of annual herding pat-
terns (as is often presumed) but instead was intentional, motivated by the
desire for trade, loot, or glory. The later annual migration pattern does at
least show that in the spring and fall it was possible to drive herds of ani-
mals across the intervening desert and semi-desert. 27

Petrovka settlements commonly contained two-part furnaces, slag, and
abundant evidence of copper smelting, like Sintashta settlements. But, un-
like Sintashta, most Petrovka metal objects were made of tin-bronze. 28 A
possible source for the tin in Petrovka tin-bronzes, in addition to the Zer-
avshan valley, was in the western foothills of the Altai Mountains. A re-
markable shift occurred in the forest-steppe zone north of the Petrovka
territory during the early Petrovka phase.

The Seima-Turbino Horizon in the Forest-Steppe Zone

The Seima-Turbino horizon marks the entry of the forest-steppe and
forest-zone foragers into the cycle of elite competition, trade, and warfare
that had erupted earlier in the northern steppes. The tin-bronze spears,
daggers, and axes of the Seima-Turbino horizon were among the most

Figure 16.13 (< continued ) Maliutina 1991, Figure 14. The stratigraphic com-
plexity of these settlements contributes to arguments about phases and
chronology.

444 Chapter 16

technically and aesthetically refined weapons in the ancient world, but
they were made by forest and forest-steppe societies that in some places
(Tashkovo II) still depended on hunting and fishing. These very high-
quality tin-bronze objects first appeared among the Elunino and Krotovo
cultures located on the upper and middle Irtysh and the upper Ob in the
western foothills of the Altai Mountains, a surprisingly remote region for
such a remarkable exhibition of metallurgical skill. But tin, copper, and
gold ores all could be found on the upper Irtysh, near the confluence of the
Irtysh and the Bukhtarta rivers about 600 km east of Karaganda. The ex-
ploitation of these ore sources apparently was accompanied by an explo-
sion of new metallurgical skills.

One of the earliest and most important Seima-Turbino cemeteries was at
Rostovka in the Omsk oblast on the middle Irtysh (figure 16.14). Although
skeletal preservation was poor, many of the thirty-eight graves seem to have
contained no human bones at all or just a few fragments of a skeleton. In the
graves with whole bodies the skeleton was supine with the legs and arms
extended. Grave gifts were offered both in the graves and in ritual deposits
at the edge of graves. Both kinds of offerings included tin-bronze socketed
spearheads, single-edged curved knives with cast figures on the pommel,
and hollow-core bronze axes decorated with triangles and lozenges. Grave
21 contained bivalve molds for making all three of these weapon types. Of-
ferings also included stemmed flint projectile points of the same types that
appeared in Sintashta graves, bone plates pierced to make plate armor, and
nineteen hundred sherds of Krotovo pottery (figure 16.14). One grave (gr. 2)
contained a lapis lazuli bead from Afghanistan, probably traded through the
BMAC, strung with beads of nephrite, probably from the Baikal region. 29

Seima-Turbino metalsmiths were, with Petrovka metalsmiths, the first
north of Central Asia to regularly use a tin-bronze alloy. But Seima-
Turbino metalsmiths were unique in their mastery of lost-wax casting (for
decorative figures on dagger handles) and thin-walled hollow-mold cast-
ing (for socketed spears and hollow axes). Socketed spearheads were made
on Sintashta anvils by bending a bronze sheet around a socket form and
then forging the seam (figure 16.15). Seima-Turbino socketed spearheads
were made by pouring molten metal into a mold that created a seamless
cast socket around a suspended core, making a hollow interior, a much
more sophisticated operation, and easier to do with tin-bronze than with
arsenical bronze. Axes were made in a similar way, tin-bronze with a hol-
low interior, cast around a suspended core. Lost-wax and hollow-mold
casting methods probably were learned from the BMAC civilization, the
only reasonably nearby source (perhaps through a skilled captive?).

The Eurasian Steppes 44s

Figure 16.14 The Rostovka cemetery near Omsk, one of the most important
sites of the Seima-Turbino culture. Graves are numbered. Black dots repre-
sent ceramics, metal objects, and other artifacts deposited above and beside
the graves. All the pots conform to the Krotova type. After Matiushchenko
and Sinitsyna 1988, figures 4, 81, 82, and 83.

44^ Chapter 16

Figure 16.15 Grave lots from the Rostovka cemetery, graves 1, 2, and 8. The
lost-wax cast figure of a man roping a horse and the hollow-mold casting of
spears and axes were technical innovations probably learned from BMAC
metalsmiths. Grave 1 contained beads made of both lapis lazuli from Af-
ghanistan and nephrite probably from the near Lake Baikal. After Matiush-
chenko and Sinitsyna 1988, figures 6, 7, 17, and 18.

Beyond the western Altai/middle Irtysh core area the Seima-Turbino
horizon was not a culture. It did not have a standard ceramic type, settle-
ment type, or even a standard mortuary rite. Rather, Seima-Turbino
metal-working techniques were adopted by emerging elites across the
southern Siberian forest-steppe zone, perhaps in reaction to and com-
peting with the Sintashta and Petrovka elites in the northern steppes. A

The Eurasian Steppes 447

series of original and distinctive new metal types quickly diffused through
the forest-steppe zone from the east to the west, appearing in late Aba-
shevo and Chirkovskaya cemeteries west of the Urals almost at the same
time that they first appeared east of the Urals, beginning about 1900
BCE. The rapidity and reach of this phenomenon in the forest zone is
surprising. The new metal styles probably spread more by emulation than
by migration, along with fast-moving political changes in the structure of
power. Seima-Turbino spearheads, daggers, and axes were displayed at
the Turbino cemetery in the forests of the lower Kama, southward up the
Oka, and as far south as the Borodino hoard in Moldova, in the East
Carpathian foothills. East of the Urals, most Seima-Turbino bronzes
were tin-bronzes, and west of the Urals, they were mostly arsenical
bronzes. The source of the tin was in the east, but the styles and methods
of Seima-Turbino metallurgy were diffused across the forest-steppe and
forest zones from the Altai to the Carpathians. The Borodino hoard con-
tained a nephrite axe probably made of stone quarried near Lake Baikal.
In the eastern direction, Seima-Turbino metal types (hollow-cast sock-
eted spearheads with a side hook, hollow-cast axes) appeared also in sites
on the northwestern edges of the evolving archaic Chinese state, probably
through a network of trading trails that passed north of the Tien Shan
through Dzungaria. 30

The dating of the Seima-Turbino horizon has changed significantly in
recent years. Similarities between Seima-Turbino socketed spearheads and
daggers and parallel objects in Mycenaean tombs were once used to date
the Seima-Turbino horizon to a period after 1650 BCE. It is clear now,
however, that Mycenaean socketed spearheads, like studded disk cheek-
pieces, were derived from the east and not the other way around. Seima-
Turbino and Sintashta were partly contemporary, so Seima-Turbino
probably began before 1900 BCE. 31 Seima-Turbino and Sintasha graves
had the same kinds of flint projectile points. Sintashta forged socketed
spearheads probably were the simpler predecessors of the more refined
hollow-cast Seima-Turbino socketed spearheads. A hollow-cast spearhead
of Seima-Turbino type was deposited in a Petrovka-culture chariot grave
at Krivoe Ozero (k. 2, gr. 1); and a Sintashta bent and forged spearhead
appeared in the Seima-Turbino cemetery at Rostovka (gr. 1) (see figure
16.15).

The metal-working techniques of the northern steppes (Sintashta and
Petrovka) and the forest-steppe zone (Seima-Turbino) remained separate
and distinct for perhaps one hundred to two hundred years. But by the
beginning of the Andronovo period they merged, and some important

448 Chapter 16

Seima-Turbino metal types, such as cast single-edged knives with a ring-
pommel, became widely popular in Andronovo communities.

East of the Urals, Phase II: The Andronovo Horizon

The Andronovo horizon was the principal LBA archaeological complex in
the steppes east of the Urals, the sister of the Srubnaya horizon west of the
Urals, between about 1800 and 1200 BCE. Andronovo sites extended
from the Ural steppes eastward to the steppes on the upper Yenisei River
in the Altai, and from the southern forest zone southward to the Amu
Darya River in Central Asia. Andronovo contained two principal sub-
groups, Alakul and Federovo. The earliest of these, the Alakul complex,
appeared in some places by about 1900-1800 BCE. It grew directly out of
the Petrovka culture by small modifications of ceramic decorations and
vessel shapes. The Federovo style might have developed from a southern or
eastern stylistic variant of Alakul, although some specialists insist that it
had completely independent origins. Andronovo continued many of the
customs and styles inherited through Sintashta and Petrovka: small family
kurgan cemeteries, settlements containing ten to forty houses built close
together, similar spear and dagger types, similar ornaments, and even the
same decorative motifs on pottery: meanders, hanging triangles, “pine-
tree” figures, stepped pyramids, and zig-zags. But chariots were no longer
buried.

Alakul and Federovo are described as separate cultures within the An-
dronovo horizon, but to this observer, admittedly not an expert in the
details of LBA ceramic typology, the Alakul and Federovo ceramic styles
seem similar. Pot shapes varied only slightly (Federovo pots usually had a
more indented, undercut lower profile) and decorative motifs also varied
around common themes (some Federovo motifs were “italicized” or
forward-slanted versions of Alakul motifs). Pots and potsherds of these
two ceramic styles are found in the same sites from the Ural-Tobol steppes
southeastward to central Kazkahstan, often in the same house and pit
features, and in adjoining kurgans in the same cemeteries. Some pots are
described as Alakul with Federovo elements, so the two varieties can ap-
pear on the same pot (figure 16.16). Alakul pottery is stratified beneath
Federovo pottery in a few key features at some sites (at Novonikolskoe
and Petrovka II in the Ishim steppes and Atasu 1 in central Kazakh-
stan), but Federovo pottery has never been found stratified beneath Al-
akul. The earliest Alakul radiocarbon dates (1900-1700 BCE) are a little
older than the earliest Federovo dates (1800-1600 BCE), so Alakul

The Eurasian Steppes 449

Figure 16.16 Andronovo pots that are described as typical Alkakul (A) or
Alakul with Federovo traits (A+F) from the Priplodvi Log kurgan cemetery
I on the Ui River, Chelyabinsk oblast, Russia. Traits of both styles can appear
on the same pot. After Maliutina 1984, figure 4.

probably began a century or two earlier, although in many settlements
the two are thoroughly mixed. Kurgans containing Federovo pots often
had larger, more complex stone constructions around the grave and the
dead were cremated, whereas kurgans with Alakul pots were simpler and
the dead usually were buried in the flesh. Since the two ceramic styles
occurred in the same settlements and cemeteries, and even in the same
house and pit features, they cannot easily be interpreted as distinct eth-
nic groups. 32

The spread of the Andronovo horizon represented the maturation and
consolidation of an economy based on cattle and sheep herding almost
everywhere in the grasslands east of the Urals. Permanent settlements ap-
peared in every region, occupied by 50 to 250 people who lived in large
houses. Wells provided water through the winter. Some settlements had
elaborate copper-smelting ovens. Small-scale agriculture might have
played a minor role in some places, but there is no direct evidence for it. In
the northern steppes cattle were more important than sheep (cattle 40%
of bones, sheep/goat 37%, horses 17% in the Ishim steppes), whereas in

4$o Chapter 16

central Kazakhstan there were more sheep than cattle, and more horses as
well (sheep/goat 46%, cattle 29%, horse 24%). 33

Although it is common in long-established tribal culture areas for a
relatively homogeneous material culture to mask multiple languages, the
link between language and material culture often is strong among the
early generations of long-distance migrants. The source of the Andronovo
horizon can be identified in an extraordinary burst of economic, military,
and ritual innovations by a single culture — the Sintashta culture. Many of
its customs were retained by its eastern daughter, the Petrovka culture.
The language spoken in Sintashta strongholds very likely was an older
form of the language spoken by the Petrovka and Andronovo people.
Indo-Iranian and Proto-Iranian dialects probably spread with Andronovo
material culture.

Most Andronovo metals, like Petrovka metals, were tin-bronzes.
Andronovo miners mined tin in the Zeravshan and probably on the up-
per Irtysh. Andronovo copper mines were active in two principal re-
gions: one was south of Karaganda near Uspenskyi, working malachite
and azurite oxide ores; and the other was to the west in the southern
Ulutau Hills near Dzhezkazgan, working sulfide ores. (Marked on fig-
ure 15.9.) One mine of at least seven known in the Dzhezkazgan region
was 1,500 m long, 500 m wide, and 15 m deep. Ore was transported
from the Uspenskyi mine to copper-smelting settlements such as Atasu
1, where excavation revealed three key-shaped smelting ovens with 4
m-long stone-lined air shafts feeding into two-level circular ovens. The
Karaganda-region copper mines are estimated to have produced 30 to
50,000 metric tons of smelted copper during the Bronze Age. 34 The
labor and facilities at these places suggest enterprises organized for
export.

Trade with and perhaps looting raids into Central Asia left clear evi-
dence surprisingly far north in the steppes. Wheel-made Namamzga VI
pottery was found in the Andronovo settlement of Pavlovka, in northern
Kazkahstan near Kokchetav, 2,000 km north of Bactria. It was 12% of the
pottery on two house floors. The remainder was Andronovo pottery of the
Federovo type. 35 The imported Central Asian pots were made with very
fine white or red clay fabrics, largely undecorated, and in forms such as
pedestaled dishes that were typical of Namazaga VI (figure 16.17). Pav-
lovka was a settlement of about 5 ha with both Petrovka and Federovo
pottery. The Central Asian pottery is said to have been associated with the
Federovo component.

452 Chapter 16

Proto-Vedic Cultures in the Central Asian Contact Zone

By about 1900 BCE Petrovka migrants had started to mine copper in the
Zeravshan valley at Tugai. They were followed by larger contingents of An-
dronovo people who mined tin at Karnab and Mushiston. After 1800 BCE
Andronovo mining camps, kurgan cemeteries, and pastoral camps spread
into the middle and upper Zeravshan valley. Other Andronovo groups
moved into the lower Zeravshan and the delta of the lower Amu Darya
(now located in the desert east of the modern delta) and became settled
irrigation farmers, known as the Tazabagyab variant of the Andronovo
culture. They lived in small settlements of a few large dug-out houses,
much like Andronovo houses; used Andronovo pottery and Andronovo-
style curved bronze knives and twisted earrings; conducted in-settlement
copper smelting as at many Andronovo settlements; but buried their dead in
large flat-grave cemeteries like the one at Kokcha 3, with more than 120
graves, rather than in kurgan cemeteries (figure 16. 18). 36

About 1800 BCE the walled BMAC centers decreased sharply in size,
each oasis developed its own types of pottery and other objects, and
Andronovo-Tazabagyab pottery appeared widely in the Bactrian and
Margian countryside. Fred Hiebert termed this the post-BMAC period to
emphasize the scale of the change, although occupation continued at
many BMAC strongholds and Namazga Vl-style pottery still was made
inside them. 3. But Andronovo-Tazabagyab coarse incised pottery oc-
curred both within post-BMAC fortifications and in occasional pastoral
camps located outside the mudbrick walls. Italian survey teams exposed a
small Andronovo-Tazabagyab dug-out house southeast of the post-BMAC
walled fortress at Takhirbai 3, and American excavations found a similar
occupation outside the walls of a partly abandoned Gonur. By this time
the people living just outside the crumbling walls and at least some of
those now living inside were probably closely related. To the east, in Bac-
tria, people making similar incised coarse ware camped atop the vast ruins
(100 ha) of the Djarkutan city. Some walled centers such as Mollali-Tepe
continued to be occupied but at a smaller scale. In the highlands above the
Bactrian oases in modern Tajikistan, kurgan cemeteries of the Vaksh and
Bishkent type appeared with pottery that mixed elements of the late
BMAC and Andronovo-Tazabagyab traditions. 38

Between about 1800 and 1600 BCE, control over the trade in minerals
(copper, tin, turquoise) and pastoral products (horses, dairy, leather) gave
the Andronovo-Tazabagyab pastoralists great economic power in the old

The Eurasian Steppes 45 J

Tazabagyab Culture

• •OCC CO C ftCOCK

Figure 16.18 Graves of the Tazabagyab-Andronovo culture at the Kokcha 3
cemetery on the old course of the lower Amu-Darya River. Pottery like this
was widespread in the final phase of occupation in the declining BMAC
walled towns of Central Asia, 1700-1500 BCE. After Tolstov and Kes’ 1960,

454 Chapter 16

BMAC oasis towns and strongholds, and chariot warfare gave them
military control. Social, political, and even military integration probably
followed. Eventually the simple incised pottery of the steppes gave way
to new ceramic traditions, principally gray polished wares in Margiana
and the Kopet Dag, and painted wares in Bactria and eastward into
Tajikistan.

By 1600 BCE all the old trading towns, cities, and brick-built fortified
estates of eastern Iran and the former BMAC region in Central Asia were
abandoned. Malyan, the largest city on the Iranian plateau, was reduced
to a small walled compound and tower occupied within a vast ruin, where
elite administrators, probably representatives of the Elamite kings, still
resided atop the former city. Pastoral economies spread across Iran and
into Baluchistan, where clay images of riders on horseback appeared at
Pirak about 1700 BCE. Chariot corps appeared across the Near East as a
new military technology. An Old Indic-speaking group of chariot war-
riors took control of a Hurrian-speaking kingdom in north Syria about
1500 BCE. Their oaths referred to deites (Indra, Varuna, Mithra, and the
Nasatyas) and concepts ( rta ) that were the central deities and concepts in
the Rig Veda, and the language they spoke was a dialect of the Old Indie
Sanskrit of the Rig Veda. " 9 The Mitanni dynasts came from the same eth-
nolinguistic population as the more famous Old Indic-speakers who si-
multaneously pushed eastward into the Punjab, where, according to many
Vedic scholars, the Rig Veda was compiled about 1500-1300 BCE. Both
groups probably originated in the hybrid cultures of the Andronovo/
Tazabagyab/ coarse-incised-ware type in Bactria and Margiana. 40

The language ol the Rig Veda contained many traces of its syncretic ori-
gins. Tie deity name Indra and the drug-deity name Soma , the two central
elements of the religion of the Rig Veda, were non-Indo-Iranian words
borrowed in the contact zone. Many of the qualities of the Indo-Iranian
god of might/victory, Verethraghna, were transferred to the adopted god
Indra, who became the central deity of the developing Old Indie culture. 41
Indra was the subject of 250 hymns, a quarter of the Rig Veda. He was as-
sociated more than any other deity with Soma, a stimulant drug (perhaps
derived from Ephedra) probably borrowed from the BMAC religion. His
rise to prominence was a peculiar trait of the Old Indie speakers. Indra
was regarded in later Avestan Iranian texts as a minor demon. Iranian dia-
lects probably developed in the northern steppes among Andronovo and
Srubnaya people who had kept their distance from the southern civiliza-
tions. Old Indie languages and rituals developed in the contact zone of
Central Asia. 42

The Eurasian Steppes 455

Loan Words Borrowed into Indo-Iranian and Vedic Sanskrit

Tie Old Indie of the Rig Veda contained at least 383 non-Indo-European
words borrowed from a source belonging to a different language family.
Alexander Lubotsky has shown that common Indo-Iranian, the parent of
both Old Indie and Iranian, probably had already borrowed words from
the same non-Indo-European language that later enriched Old Indie. He
compiled a list of 55 non-Indo-European words that were borrowed into
common Indo-Iranian before Old Indie or Avestan evolved, and then later
were inherited into one or both of the daughters from common Indo-
Iranian. Tie speakers of common Indo-Iranian were in touch with and
borrowed terms from the same foreign language group that later was the
source from which Old Indie speakers borrowed even more terms. This
discovery carries significant implications for the geographic locations of
common Indo-Iranian and formative Old Indie — they must have been
able to interact with the same foreign-language group.

Among the fifty-five terms borrowed into common Indo-Iranian were
the words for bread (*nagna-), ploughshare ( spkara ), canal (*iavid), brick
(*ist(i)a-, camel ( *Hustra -), ass ftfara-) sacrificing priest (*ucig~), soma (*ancu-),
and Indra (*indra-). The BMAC fortresses and cities are an excellent source
for the vocabulary related to irrigation agriculture, bricks, camels, and don-
keys; and the phonology of the religious terms is the same, so probably came
from the same source. The religious loans suggest a close cultural relation-
ship between some people who spoke common Indo-Iranian and the occu-
pants of the BMAC fortresses. These borrowed southern cults might possibly
have been one of the features that distinguished the Petrovka culture from
Sintashta. Petrovka people were the first to migrate from the northern
steppes to Tugai on the northern edge of Central Asia.

Lubotsky suggested that Old Indie developed as a vanguard language
south of Indo-Iranian, closer to the source of the loans. The archaeological
evidence supports Lubotskys suggestion. The earliest Old Indie dialects
probably developed about 1800-1600 BCE in the contact zone south of
the Zeravshan among northern-derived immigrants who were integrated
with and perhaps ruled over the declining fortunes of the post-BMAC
citadels. Tiey retained a decidedly pastoral set of values. In the Rig Veda
the clouds were compared to dappled cows full of milk; milk and butter
were the symbols of prosperity; milk, butter, cattle, and horses were the
proper offerings to the gods; Indra was compared to a mighty bull; and
wealth was counted in fat cattle and swift horses. Agricultural products

456 Chapter 16

were never offered to the gods. The people of the Rig Veda did not live in
brick houses and had no cities, although their enemies, the Dasyus , did
live in walled strongholds. Chariots were used in races and war; the gods
drove chariots across the sky. Almost all important deities were mascu-
line. The only important female deity was Dawn, and she was less powerful
than Indra, Varuna, Mithra, Agni, or the Divine Twins. Funerals included
both cremation (as in Federovo graves) and inhumation (as in Andronovo
and Tazabagyab graves). Steppe cultures are an acceptable source for all
these details of belief and practice, whereas the culture of the BMAC,
with its female deity in a flounced skirt, brick fortresses, and irrigation
agriculture, clearly is not.

During the initial phase of contact, the Sintashta or the Petrovka cul-
tures or both borrowed some vocabulary and rituals from the BMAC,
accounting for the fifty-five terms in common Indo-Iranian. These in-
cluded the drug soma , which remained in Iranian ritual usage as haoma. In
the second phase of contact, the speakers of Old Indie borrowed much
more heavily from the same language when they lived in the shadows of
the old BMAC settlements and began to explore southward into Afghan-
istan and Iran. Archaeology shows a pattern quite compatible with that
suggested by the linguistic evidence.

The Steppes Become a Bridge across Eurasia

The Eurasian steppe is often regarded as a remote and austere place, poor
in resources and far from the centers of the civilized world. But during the
Late Bronze Age the steppes became a bridge between the civilizations
that developed on the edges of the continent in Greece, the Near East,
Iran, the Indian subcontinent, and China. Chariot technology, horses and
horseback riding, bronze metallurgy, and a strategic location gave steppe
societies an importance they never before had possessed. Nephrite from
Lake Baikal appeared in the Carpathian foothills in the Borodino hoard;
horses and tin from the steppes appeared in Iran; pottery from Bactria ap-
peared in a Federovo settlement in northern Kazakhstan; and chariots
appeared across the ancient world from Greece to China. The road from
the steppes to China led through the eastern end of the Tarim Basin,
where desert-edge cemeteries preserved the dessicated mummies of brown-
haired, white-skinned, wool-wearing people dated as early as 1800 BCE.
In Gansu, on the border between China and the Tarim Basin, the Qijia
culture acquired horses, trumpet-shaped earrings, cast bronze ring-pommel

The Eurasian Steppes 457

single-edged knives and axes in steppe styles between about 2000 and
1600 BCE. 45 By the time the first Chinese state emerged, beginning about
1800 BCE, it was exchanging innovations with the West. The Srubnaya
and Andronovo horizons had transformed the steppes from a series of iso-
lated cultural ponds to a corridor of communication. That transformation
permanently altered the dynamics of Eurasian history.

Words and Deeds 459

Chapter Seventeen

Words and Deeds

The Indo-European problem can be solved today because archaeological
discoveries and advances in linguistics have eaten away at problems that
remained insoluble as recently as fifteen years ago. The lifting of the Iron
Curtain after 1991 made the results of steppe research more easily avail-
able to Western scholars and created new cooperative archaeological proj-
ects and radiocarbon dating programs. Linguists like Johanna Nichols,
Sarah Thomason, and Terrence Kaufman came up with new ways ot un-
derstanding language spread and convergence. The publication of the Kh-
valynsk cemetery and the Sintashta chariot burials revealed unsuspected
richness in steppe prehistory. Linguistic and archaeological discoveries
now converge on the probability that Proto-Indo-European was spoken in
the Pontic-Caspian steppes between 4500 and 2500 BCE, and alternative
possibilities are increasingly difficult to square with new evidence. Gim-
butas and Mallory preceded me in arguing this case. I began this book by
trying to answer questions that still bothered many reasonable observers.

One question was whether prehistoric language borders could be de-
tected in prehistoric material culture. I suggested that they were correlated
at persistent frontiers, a generally rare phenomenon that was surprisingly
common among the prehistoric cultures of the Pontic-Caspian steppes.
Another problem was the reluctance of Western archaeologists and the
overenthusiasm of Eastern European archaeologists to use migration as an
explanation for prehistoric culture change, a divergence in approach that
produced Eastern interpretations that Western archaeologists would not
take seriously. I introduced models from demographics, sociology, and
anthropology that describe how migration works as a predictable, regular
human behavior in an attempt to bring both sides to the middle. The most
divisive problem was the absence of convincing evidence indicating when
horse domestication and horseback riding began. Bit wear might settle the
issue through the presence or absence of a clear riding-related pathology

on horse teeth. A separate but related debate swirled around the question
of whether pastoral nomadism was possible as early as the Yamnaya hori-
zon, or if it depended on later horseback riding, which in this argument
only began in the Iron Age; or perhaps it depended on state economies,
which also appeared on the steppe border during the Iron Age. The Sa-
mara Valley Project examined the botanical and seasonal aspects of a
Bronze Age steppe pastoral economy and found that it did not rely on cul-
tivated grain even in year-round permanent settlements. Steppe pastoral-
ism was entirely self-sustaining and independent in the Bronze Age; wild
seed plants were plentiful, and wild seeds were eaten where grain was not
cultivated. Pastoral nomadism did not depend for its food supply on Iron
Age states. Finally, the narrative culture history of the western steppes was
impenetrable to most Western linguists and archaeologists. Much of this
book is devoted to my efforts to cut a path through the tangle of arguments
about chronology, culture groups, origins, migrations, and influences. I
have tried to reduce my areas of ignorance about steppe archaeology, but
am mindful of the few years I spent doing federally funded archaeology in
Massachusetts, less than half the size of the single Samara oblast on the
Volga, and how we all thought it an impossible task to try to learn the
archaeology of Massachusetts and neighboring Rhode Island — one-tenth
the size of Samara oblast. Nevertheless, I have found a path that makes
sense through what I have read and seen. Debate will continue on all these
subjects, but I sense that a chord is emerging from the different notes.

The Horse and the Wheel

Innovations in transportation technology are among the most powerful
causes of change in human social and political life. The introduction of the
private automobile created suburbs, malls, and superhighways; transformed
heavy industry; generated a vast market for oil; polluted the atmosphere;
scattered families across the map; provided a rolling, heated space in which
young people could escape and have sex; and fashioned a powerful new way
to express personal status and identity. The beginning of horseback riding,
the invention of the heavy wagon and cart, and the development of the
spoke-wheeled chariot had cumulative effects that unfolded more slowly
but eventually were equally profound. One of those effects was to trans-
form Eurasia from a series of unconnected cultures into a single interacting
system. How that happened is a principal focus of this book.

Most historians think of war when they begin to list the changes caused
by horseback riding and the earliest wheeled vehicles. But horses were first

460 Chapter 77

domesticated by people who thought of them as food. They were a cheap
source of winter meat; they could feed themselves through the steppe win-
ter, when cattle and sheep needed to be supplied with water and fodder.
After people were familiar with horses as domesticated animals, perhaps
after a relatively docile male bloodline was established, someone found a
particularly submissive horse and rode on it, perhaps as a joke. But riding
soon found its first serious use in the management of herds of domesti-
cated cattle, sheep, and horses. In this capacity alone it was an important
improvement that enabled fewer people to manage larger herds and move
them more efficiently, something that really mattered in a world where
domesticated animals were the principal source of food and clothing. By
4800-4600 BCE horses were included with obviously domesticated ani-
mals in human funeral rituals at Khvalysnk on the middle Volga.

By about 4200-4000 BCE people living in the Pontic-Caspian steppes
probably were beginning to ride horses to advance to and retreat from
raids. Once they began to ride, there was nothing to prevent them from
riding into tribal conflicts. Organic bits functioned perfectly well, Eneo-
lithic steppe horses were big enough to ride (13-14 hands), and the leaders
of steppe tribes began to carry stone maces as soon as they began to keep
herds of cattle and sheep, around 5200-4800 BCE. By 4200 BCE people
had become more mobile, their single graves emphasized individual status
and personal glory unlike the older communal funerals, high-status graves
contained stone maces shaped like horse heads and other weapons, and
raiding parties migrated hundreds of kilometers to enrich themselves with
Balkan copper, which they traded or gifted back to their relatives in the
Dnieper-Azov steppes. The collapse of Old Europe about 4200-4000 BCE
probably was at least partly their doing.

The relationship between mounted steppe pastoralists and sedentary
agricultural societies has usually been seen by historians as either violent,
like the Suvorovo confrontation with Old Europe, or parasitic, or both. “Bar-
baric” pastoral societies, hungry for grain, metals, and wealth, none of which
they could produce themselves, preyed upon their “civilized” neighbors,
without whom they could not survive. But these ideas are inaccurate and
incomplete even for the historical period, as the Soviet ethnographer
Sergei Vainshtein, the Western historian Nicola DiCosmo, and our own
botanical studies have shown. Pastoralism produced plenty of food — the
average nomad probably ate better than the average agricultural peasant in
Medieval China or Europe. Steppe miners and craftsmen mined their
own abundant ores and made their own metal tools and weapons; in fact,
the enormous copper mines of Russia and Kazakhstan and the tin mines

Words and Deeds 461

of the Zeravshan show that the Bronze Age civilizations of the Near East
depended on them . For the prehistoric era covered in this book, any model
based on relationships between the militarized nomads of the steppes and
the medieval civilizations of China or Persia is anachronistic. Although
the steppe societies of the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka period did seem to
prey upon their neighbors in the lower Danube valley, they were clearly
more integrated and apparently had peaceful relationships with their
Cucuteni-Tripolye neighbors at the same time. Maikop traders seem to
have visited steppe settlements on the lower Don and even perhaps brought
weavers there. The institutions that regulated peaceful exchange and cross-
cultural relationships were just as important as the institution of the raid.

The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary and comparative
Indo-European mythology reveal what two of those important integrative
institutions were: the oath-bound relationship between patrons and cli-
ents, which regulated the reciprocal obligations between the strong and
the weak, between gods and humans; and the guest-host relationship,
which extended these and other protections to people outside the ordinary
social circle. The first institution, legalizing inequality, probably was very
old, going back to the initial acceptance of the herding economy, about
5200-5000 BCE, and the first appearance of pronounced differences in
wealth. The second might have developed to regulate migrations into un-
regulated geographic and social space at the beginning of the Yamnaya
horizon.

When wheeled vehicles were introduced into the steppes, probably
about 3300 BCE, they again found their first use in the herding economy.
Early wagons and carts were slow, solid-wheeled vehicles probably pulled
by oxen and covered by arched roofs made of reed mats plaited together,
perhaps originally attached to a felt backing. Yamnaya-era graves often
contain remnants of reed mats with other decayed organic material. On
some occasions the mats were painted in red, black, and white stripes and
curved designs, certainly at funerals. Wagons permitted herders to mi-
grate with their herds into the deep steppes between the river valleys for
weeks or months at a time, relying on the tents, food, and water carried in
their wagons. Even if the normal annual range of movement was less than
50 km, which seems likely for Yamnaya herders, the combination of bulk
wagon transport with rapid horseback transport revolutionized steppe
economies, opening the majority of the Eurasian steppe zone to efficient
exploitation. The steppes, largely wild and unused before, were domesti-
cated. The Yamnaya horizon exploded across the Pontic-Caspian steppes
about 3300 BCE. With it probably went Proto-Indo-European, its dialects

462 Chapter iy

scattering as its speakers moved apart, their migrations sowing the seeds
of Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Italic, Celtic, Armenian, and Phrygian.

The chariot, the first wheeled vehicle designed entirely for speed, first
appeared in the graves of the Sintashta culture, in the southern Ural steppes,
about 2100 BCE. It was meant to intimidate. A chariot was incredibly dif-
ficult to build, a marvel of carpentry and bent-wood joinery. It required a
specially trained team of fast, strong horses. To drive it through a turn, you
had to rein each horse independently while keeping a backless, bouncing
car level by leaning your weight into each bounce. It was even more difficult
to throw a javelin accurately at a target while driving a speeding chariot,
but the evidence from the Sintashta chariot graves suggests that this is pre-
cisely what they did. Only men with a lot of time and resources, as well as
balance and courage, could learn to fight from a chariot. When a squadron
of javelin-hurling chariot warriors wheeled onto the field of battle, supported
by clients and supporters on foot and horseback with axes, spears, and dag-
gers, it was a new, lethal style of fighting that had never been seen before,
something that even urban kings soon learned to admire.

This heroic world of chariot-driving warriors was dimly remembered in
the poetry of the Iliad and the Rig Veda . It was introduced to the civiliza-
tions of Central Asia and Iran about 2100 BCE, when exotic Sintashta or
Petrovka strangers first appeared on the banks of the Zeravshan, probably
bouncing along on the backs of the new kinds of equids from the north.
At first, this odd way of moving around probably was amusing to the local
people of Sarazm and Zaman Baba. Very soon, however, both places were
abandoned. Between 2000 and 1800 BCE first Petrovka and then Alakul-
Andronovo groups settled in the Zeravshan valley and began mining cop-
per and tin. Horses and chariots appeared across the Near East, and the
warfare of cities became dependent, for the first time, on well-trained
horses. The Old Indie religion probably emerged among northern-derived
immigrants in the contact zone between the Zeravshan and Iran as a syn-
cretic mixture of old Central Asian and new Indo-European elements.
From this time forward the people of the Eurasian steppes remained di-
rectly connected with the civilizations of Central Asia, South Asia, and
Iran, and, through intermediaries, with China. The arid lands that occu-
pied the center of the Eurasian continent began to play a role in trans-
continental economies and politics.

Jared Diamond, in Guns , Germs , and Steely suggested that the cultures
of Eurasia enjoyed an environmental advantage over those of Africa or the
Americas partly because the Eurasian continent is oriented in an east-west
direction, making it easier for innovations like farming, herding, and

Words and Deeds 46 J

wheeled vehicles to spread rapidly between environments that were basi-
cally similar because they were on about the same latitude. 1 But persistent
cultural borders like the Ural frontier delayed the transmission of those
innovations by thousands of years even within the single ecological zone
of the steppes. A herding economy was accepted on the middle Ural River,
near the headwaters of the Samara River, by 4800 BCE. Hunters and
gatherers in the neighboring steppes of northern Kazakhstan, at the same
latitude, refused domesticated cattle and sheep for the next two thousand
years (although they did begin to ride horses by 3700-3500 BCE). The
potential geographic advantage Diamond described was frustrated for
millennia, not a short time, by human distrust of foreign ways of doing
things and admiration for the familiar ways. This tendency was hyper-
developed when two very different cultures were brought into contact
through long-distance migrations or at an ecological border. In the case of
the Ural frontier, the Khvalynian Sea separated the populations east and
west of the Ural Mountains for millennia, and the saline desert-steppe
that replaced it (chapter 8) probably remained a significant ecological bar-
rier for pedestrian foragers. Places like the Ural River frontier became bor-
ders where deep-rooted, intransigent traditions of opposition persisted.

These long-lasting, robust kinds of frontiers seem to have been rare in
the prehistoric world of tribal politics. We have grown accustomed to
them now only because the modern nation-state has made it the standard
kind of border everywhere around the world, encouraging patriotism, jin-
goism, and the suspicion of other nations across sharply defined boundar-
ies. In the tribal past, the long-term survival o! sharp, bundled oppositions
was unusual. The Pontic-Caspian steppes, however, witnessed an unusual
number of persistent tribal frontiers because sharp environmental ecotones
ran across it and it had a complex history oflong-distance migrations, two
important factors in the creation and maintenance of such frontiers.

Archaeology and Language

Indo-European languages replaced non-Indo-European languages in a
multi-staged, uneven process that continues today, with the worldwide
spread of English. No single factor explains every event in that compli-
cated and drawn-out history — not race, demographics, population pres-
sure, or imagined spiritual qualities. The three most important steps in the
spread of Indo-European languages in the last two thousand years were
the rise of the Latin-speaking Roman Empire (an event almost prevented
by Hannibal); the expansion of Spanish, English, Russian, and French

464 Chapter iy

colonial powers in Asia, America, and Africa; and the recent triumph of
the English-speaking Western capitalist trade system, in which American-
business English has piggybacked onto British-colonial English. No his-
torian would suggest that these events shared a single root cause. If we can
draw any lessons about language expansion from them, it is perhaps only
that an initial expansion can make later expansions easier (the lingua
franca effect), and that language generally follows military and economic
power (the elite dominance effect, so named by Renfrew). The earliest Indo-
European expansions described in this book laid a foundation of sorts for
later expansions by increasing the territorial extent of the Indo-European
languages, but their continued spread never was inevitable, and each ex-
pansion had its own local causes and effects. These local events are much
more important and meaningful than any imagined spiritual cause.

It is not likely that the initial spread of the Proto-Indo-European dia-
lects into regions outside the Pontic-Caspian steppes was caused primarily
by an organized invasion or a series of military conquests. As I suggested
in chapter 14, the initial spread of Proto-Indo-European dialects probably
was more like a franchising operation than an invasion. At least a few
steppe chiefs must have moved into each new region, and their initial ar-
rival might well have been accompanied by cattle raiding and violence.
But equally important to their ultimate success were the advantages they
enjoyed in institutions (patron-client systems and guest-host agreements
that incorporated outsiders as individuals with rights and protections) and
perhaps in the public performances associated with Indo-European ritu-
als. Their social system was maintained by myths, rituals, and institutions
that were adopted by others, along with the poetic language that conveyed
their prayers to the gods and ancestors. Long after the genetic imprint of
the original immigrant chiefs faded away, the system of alliances, obliga-
tions, myths, and rituals that they introduced was still being passed on
from generation to generation. Ultimately the last remnant of this inheri-
tance is the expanding echo of a once-shared language that survives as the
Indo-European language family.

Understanding the people who lived before us is difficult, particularly
the people who lived in the prehistoric tribal past. Archaeology throws a
bright light on some aspects of their lives but leaves much in the dark.
Historical linguistics can illuminate a few of those dark corners. But the
combination of prehistoric archaeology with historical linguistics has a
bad history. The opportunities for imaginative fantasies of many kinds,
both innocent and malevolent, seem dangerously increased when these
two very different kinds of evidence are mixed. There is no way to stop

Words an Deeds 465

that from happening — as Eric Hobsbawm once remarked, historians are
doomed to provide the raw material for bigotry and nationalism. 2 But he
did not let that stop him from doing history.

For Indo-European archaeology, the errors of the past cannot be re-
peated as easily today. When the nineteenth-century fantasy of the Ary-
ans began there were no material remains, no archaeological findings, to
constrain the imagination. The Aryans of Madison Grant were concocted
from spare linguistic evidence (and even that was twisted to his purpose),
a large dose of racism, a cover of ideals derived from the Classical litera-
ture of Greece and Rome, and the grim zero-sum politics of social Dar-
winism. Archaeology really played no role. The scattered archaeological
discoveries of the first half of the twentieth century could still be forced
into this previously established imaginary mold. But that is not so easy
today. A convincing narrative about the speakers of Proto-Indo-European
must today be pegged to a vast array of archaeological facts, and it must
remain un-contradicted by the facts that stand outside the chosen narra-
tive path. I have used a lot of archaeological detail in this account, because
the more places a narrative is pegged to the facts, and the more different
kinds of facts from different sources are employed as pegs, the less likely it
is that the narrative is false. As both the density of the archaeological facts
and the quality of the linguistic evidence improve, advances in each field
should act as independent checks on the worst abuses. Although I have
used linguistic reconstructions for which there is little direct archaeologi-
cal evidence (importantly patron-client and guest-host relationships), at
least both would be compatible with the kinds of societies indicated by the
archaeological evidence.

On the positive side, the combination of archaeological evidence and
the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary can reveal entirely
new kinds of information about the prehistoric past. That promise keeps
pushing the project forward both for linguists and archaeologists. At
many critical points the interpretations presented here have been guided
by institutions, rituals, and words that I found in reconstructed Indo-
European and applied to archaeological settings. But I have barely
scratched the surface of what might be accomplished by pulling material
out of Proto-Indo-European and using it as a lens through which to exam-
ine archaeological evidence. Reciprocally, archaeological data add real-life
complexities and contradictions to the idealized Indo-European social
world of the linguists. We might not be able to retrieve the names or the
personal accomplishments of the Yamnaya chiefs who migrated into the
Danube valley around 3000 BCE, but, with the help of reconstructed

466 Chapter 77

Proto-Indo-European language and mythology, we can say something
about their values, religious beliefs, initiation rituals, kinship systems, and
the political ideals they admired. Similarly, when we try to understand the
personal, human motivation for the enormous animal sacrifices that ac-
companied the funerals of Sintashta chiefs around 2000 BCE, reading the
Rig Veda gives us a new way of understanding the value attached to public
generosity (RV 10 . 117 ):

That man is no friend who does not give of his own nourishment to
his friend, the companion at his side. Let the friend turn away from
him; this is not his dwelling-place. Let him find another man who
gives freely, even if he be a stranger. Let the stronger man give to the
man whose need is greater; let him gaze upon the lengthening path.
For riches roll like the wheels of a chariot, turning from one to an-
other. 3

Archaeologists are conscious of many historical ironies: wooden struc-
tures are preserved by burning, garbage pits survive longer than temples
and palaces, and the decay of metals leads to the preservation of textiles
buried with them. But there is another irony rarely appreciated: that in the
invisible and fleeting sounds of our speech we preserve for a future genera-
tion of linguists many details of our present world.

Appendix

Author s Note on Radiocarbon Dates

All dates in this book are given as BCE (Before the Common Era) and
CE (Common Era), the international equivalent of BC and AD.

All BCE dates in this book are based on calibrated radiocarbon dates.
Radiocarbon dates measure the time that has passed since an organic sub-
stance (commonly wood or bone) died, by counting the amount of 14 C that
remains in it. Early radiocarbon scientists thought that the concentration of
14 c in the atmosphere, and therefore in all living things, was a constant, and
they also knew that the decay rate was a constant; these two factors estab-
lished the basis for determining how long the 14 C in a dead organic substance
had been decaying. But later investigations showed that the concentration of
14 C in the atmosphere varied, probably with sunspot activity. Organisms
that lived at different times had different amounts of 14 C in their tissues, so
the baseline for counting the amount of 14 C in the tissues moved up and
down with time. This up-and-down variation in 14 C concentrations has been
measured in tree rings of known age taken from oaks and bristlecone pines
in Europe and North America. The tree-ring sequence is used to calibrate
radiocarbon dates or, more precisely, to convert raw radiocarbon dates into
real dates by correcting for the initial variation in 14 C concentrations as mea-
sured in a continuous sequence of annual tree rings. Uncalibrated radiocar-
bon dates are given here with the designation BP (before present); calibrated
dates are given as BCE. Calibrated dates are “real” dates, measured in “real”
years. The program used to convert BP to BCE dates is OxCal, which is ac-
cessible free for anyone at the website of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelera-
tor Unit.

Another kind of calibration seems to be necessary for radiocarbon dates
taken on human bones, if the humans ate a lot offish. It has long been recog-
nized that in salt-water seas, organic substances like shell or fish bones ab-
sorb old carbon that is in solution in the water, which makes radiocarbon
dates on shell and fish come out too old. This is called the “reservoir effect”
because seas act as a reservoir of old carbon. Recent studies have indicated
that the same problem can affect organisms that lived in fresh water, and
most important among these were fish. Fish absorb old carbon in solution
in fresh water, and people who eat a lot of fish will digest that old carbon

468 Appendix

number °f Q 60 120 180 240 300 360 420 480 540

E ±±±±±±±d=±

from bp date 8 16 24 32 38 46 54 62 70

Figure Al. A proposed linear correlation between the % of 15 N in dared hu-
man bone {bottom) and the number of radiocarbon years that should be sub-
tracked from radiocarbon dares {top) before they are calibrated.

and use it to build their bones. Radiocarbon dates on their bones will come
out too old. Dates measured on charcoal or the bones of horses and sheep
are not affected, because wood and grazing animals do not absorb carbon
directly from water like fish do, and they do not eat fish. Dates on human
bone can come out centuries older than dates measured on animal bone or
charcoal taken from the same grave (this is how the problem was recognized)
if the human ate a lot of fish. The size of the error depends on how much
fish the human ate and how much old carbon was in solution in the ground-
water where he or she went fishing. Old carbon content in groundwater
seems to vary from region to region, although the amount of regional varia-
tion is not at all well understood at this time. The amount of fish in the diet
can be estimated on the basis of 15 N levels in bone. Fish have much higher
percentages of 15 N in their tissues than does any other animal, so humans
with high 15 N in their bones probably ate a lot of fish. High 15 N in human
bones is a signal that radiocarbon dates from those bones probably will yield
ages that are too old.

Research to correct for reservoir effects in the steppes is just beginning
as 1 write this, so I cannot solve the problem. But many of the radiocarbon
dates from steppe archaeology are from cemeteries, and the dated material
often is human bone. Widespread tests of the 15 N in human bone from
many different steppe cemeteries, from Kazakhstan to Ukraine, indicate
that fish was a very important part of most ancient steppe diets, often ac-
counting for 50% of the meat consumed. Because I did not want to intro-
duce dates that were probably wrong, I used an approach discussed by
Bonsall, Cook, and others, and described by them as preliminary and
speculative . They studied five graves in the lower Danube valley where

Note on Radiocarbon Dates 46(4

human bone and animal bone in the same grave yielded different ages (see
chapter 7 for references). Data from these graves suggested a correction
method. The average level of 15 N in the human skeletons (15.1%) was
equated with an average radiocarbon error (425 ±55) that should be sub-
tracted prior to calibrating those dates. These averages could be placed on a
scale between the known minimum and maximum levels of 15 N found in
human bone, and, speculatively, a given level of 15 N could be equated with
an average error in radiocarbon years. The scale shown in figure A.l was
constructed in this way. It seems to yield results that solve some long-
problematic dating offsets in steppe chronology (see ch. 9, notes 4, 16, and
22; and ch. 12, note 30). When I use it — when dates are based principally
on human bone — I warn readers in the text. Whatever errors it introduces
probably are smaller than those caused by ignoring the problem. All the
radiocarbon dates listed in the tables in this book are regular BP and cali-
brated BCE dates, without any correction for the reservoir effect.

Figure A.l shows the correction scale I used to revise dates that were
measured from human bone in regions where I knew the average 15 N lev-
els in human bone. The top number is the number of years that should be

Table A.l

The average 13 C and ly N% in human bone from seventy- two individuals exca-
vated from graves in the Samara oblast, by time period.

Time Period

Sample Size

C13

N15

Years to
Subtract

MESOLITHIC

5

-20.6

13.5

—330 ±42

NEOLITHIC

8

-22.3

11.8

- 228 ±30

EARLY ENEOL

6

-20.9

14.8

-408 ±52

LATE ENEOL

6

-21.0

13.1

-306 ±39

EBA

11

-18.7

11.7

-222 ±30

MBA

11

-19.0

12.0

-240 ±32

POTAPOVKA

9

-19.1

11.3

-198±26

EARLY LBA

7

-19.1

11.4

-204 ±27

LATE LBA

9

-18.9

11.2

—192 ±26

4jo Appendix

subtracted from the BP radiocarbon date; the bottom number is the l3 N
level associated with specific subtraction numbers.

Table A.l, based on our own studies in the Samara oblast, shows the
average 15 N content in human bone for different periods, taken from mea-
surements on seventy-two individuals.

NOTES

Chapter 1. The Promise and Politics of the Mother Tongue

1. Bloch 1998:109.

2. See Sapir 1912:228.

3. Cannon 1995:28-29.

4. Poliakov 1974:188-214.

5. Veit 1989:38.

6. Grant 1916.

7. For “external origin” passages in the Rig Veda , see Witzel 1995. For “indigenous origin”
arguments, see N. Kazanas’s discussions in the Journal of Indo-European Studies 30, nos. 3-4
(2002); and 31, nos. 1-2 (2003).

8. For the Nazi pursuit of Aryan archaeology, see Arnold 1990.

9. For goddesses and Indo-Europeans, see Anthony 1995b; Eisler 1987, 1990; and Gimbu-
tas 1989, 1991. For Aryan-identity politics in Russia, see Shnirelman 1998, 1999.

10. Heidegger 1959:37-51, contrasted to Boaz 1911. For the non-Aryan element in the Rig
Veda , see Kuiper 1948, 1991.

1 1 . Harding and Sokal 1988.

12. The American Heritage Dictionary has thirteen hundred unique Proto-Indo-European
roots listed in its appendix. But multiple reconstructed words are derived from the same root
morphemes. The number of reconstructed words with distinct meanings is much greater than
the number of unique roots.

13. For doubts about proto-languages and tree diagrams, see Lincoln 1991; and Hall 1997.
For a more nuanced view of tree diagrams, see Stewart 1976. For “creolization” and convergence
creating Proto-Indo-European, see Renfrew 1987:78-86; Robb 1991; and Sherratt and Sher-
ratt 1988.

14. For framing, see Lakoff 1987:328-37.

Chapter 2. How to Reconstruct a Dead Language

1. Here is the text of the tale:

A sheep, shorn of its wool, saw some horses, one moving a heavy cart, another carrying a big
load, a third carrying a human speedily. The sheep said to the horses: “It pains me [literally, “the
heart narrows itself for me”] to see human driving horses.” The horses said: “Listen sheep, it pains
us to see that human, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself
and the sheep no longer has any wool!” On hearing that the sheep ran off into the fields.

It is impossible to construct whole sentences like this with confidence in a language known
only in fragments. Proto-Indo-European tense markers in the verbs are debated, the form of the
relative pronoun is uncertain, and the exact construction of a Proto-Indo-European complement
(sheep saw horse carrying load) is unknown. Linguists still see it as a classic challenge. See
Bynon 1977:73-74; and Mallory 1989:16-17.

2. This chapter is generally based on four basic textbooks (Bynon 1977; Beekes 1995; Hock
and Joseph 1996; and Fortson 2004), and on various encyclopedia entries in Mallory and
Adams 1997.

472 Notes to Chapter j

3. Embleton 1991.

4. Pinker 1994.

5. An example of a change in phonology, or pronunciation, that caused shifts in morphol-
ogy, or grammar, can be seen in English. German has a complex system of noun and pronoun
case endings to identify subjects, objects, and other agents, and verb endings that English lacks.
English has lost these features because a particular dialect of Middle English, Old Northum-
brian, lost them, and people who spoke the Old Northumbrian dialect, probably rich wool mer-
chants, had a powerful effect on the speech of Medieval London, which happened to give us
Modern English. The speakers of Old Northumbrian dropped the Germanic word-final n and m
in most suffixes ( esse', not essen > for “to eat”). In late Old English the pronunciation of many short
vowels (like the final -e that resulted here) was already merging into one vowel (the [uh] in sofa,
called schwa by linguists). These two shifts in pronunciation meant that many nouns no longer
had distinctive endings, and neither the infinitive nor the subjunctive plural verb had a distinct
ending. Later, between 1250 and 1300, the word-final schwa began to be dropped from most En-
glish speech, which wiped out the distinction between two more grammatical categories. Word
order became fixed, as few other guides indicated the difference between subject and object, and
auxiliary particles like to , of, or by were employed to distinguish infinitives and other forms.
Three shifts in pronunciation were responsible for much of the grammatical simplification of
modern English. Sec Thomason and Kaufman 1988:265-275.

6. For Grimm’s Law, sec Fortson 2004:300-304.

7. Some linguists argue that the Proto-Indo-European root did not begin with k but rather
with a palato-velar, a M-type sound, which would require that the first consonant was moved
back in the centum languages rather than forward in the satem languages. See Melchert
1994:251-252. Thanks to Bill Darden for pointing this out.

8. Hock and Joseph 1996:38.

9. For pessimistic views on the "reality” of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, see Bynon
1977; and Zimmer 1990. For optimistic views, sec Hock and Joseph 1996:532-534; and Fortson
2004:12-14.

10. Hall 1950, 1976.

11. Bynon 1977:72. Mycenaean was in a transitional state in 1350 BC, when it was recorded.
Some Proto-Indo-European words with k w had already shifted to k in Mycenaean. The alterna-
tion between *k v and *p probably was already present in some dialects of Proto-Indo-European.

12. For doubts on reconstructed meanings, see Renfrew 1987:80, 82, 260. For the argument
that comparing cognates requires that the meanings of the compared terms are subjected to
fairly strict limits, see Nichols 1997b.

Chapter 3. Language and Time 1

1. See Swadesh 1952, 1955; and Lees 1953.

2. The replacement rate cited here compares the core vocabulary in Modern English to the
core vocabulary in Old English, or Anglo-Saxon. Much of the Old English core vocabulary was
replaced by Norse, but, since Norse was another Germanic language, most of the core vocabulary
remains Germanic. That is why we can say that 96% of the core vocabulary remains Germanic,
and at the same time say that the replacement rate in the core vocabulary was a high 26%.

3. Much of the information in this section came from Embleton 1991, 1986. See also Mc-
Mahon and McMahon 2003; and Dyen, Kruskal, and Black 1992. Many linguists are hostile
to any claim that a cross-cultural core vocabulary can be identified. The Australian aboriginal
languages, for example, do not seem to have a core vocabulary — all vocabulary items are equally
vulnerable to replacement. Wc do not understand why. Both sides of the debate arc represented
in Renfrew, McMahon, and Trask 2000.

Notes to Chapter j 473

4. Meid 1975; Winfred 1989; and Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1984:267-319.

5. Ivanov derived Hittite (Northern Anatolian) and Luwian (Southern Anatolian) separately
and directly from Proto-Indo-European, without an intervening proto-language, making them as
different as Celtic and Greek. Most other linguists derive all the Anatolian languages from a com-
mon source, Proto-Anatolian; see Melchert 2001 and Diakonoff 1985. Lydian, spoken on the
western coast of Anatolia in the Classical era, might have descended from the same dialect group
as Hittite. Lycian, spoken on the southwestern coast, probably descended from the same dialects
as Luwian. Both became extinct in the Classical era. For all these topics, see Drews 2001.

6. For the Anatolian languages, sec Fortson 2004:154-179; Houwink Ten Cate 1995;
Veenhof 1995; and Puhvel 1991, 1994. For the glottalic perspective, sec Gamkrelidze and Iva-
nov 1995.

7. Wilusa was a city west of the Hittite realm. It is very possible that Wilusa was Troy and
that the Trojans spoke Luwian. See Watkins 1995:145-150; and Latacz 2004.

8. Tie non-Indo-European substrate effect on Luwian was described by Jaan Puhvel
(1994:261-262) as “agglutinative creoiization . . . What has happened to Anatolian here is rem-
iniscent of what became of French in places like Haiti.” Hittite showed similar non-Indo-
European substrate effects and had few speakers, causing Zimmer (1990:325) to note that, “on
the whole, the Indo-Europeanization of Anatolia failed.”

9. Melchert 2001.

10. Forster 2004; Baldi 1983:156-159.

11. Lehrman 2001. The ten innovations that Lehrman identified as distinctive of Proto-
Indo-European included two phonological traits (e.g., loss of the laryngcals), three morpho-
logical traits in nouns (e.g., addition of the feminine gender), and five morphological traits in
verbs.

12. See Sturtevant 1962 for the Indo-Hittite hypothesis. For Anatolian as a daughter of very
early Proto-Indo-European, see Puhvel 1991. Lehrman (2001) pointed out that Anatolian had a
different word from Proto-Indo-European for man , usually considered part of the core vocabulary.
The Anatolian term ( *pasna- ) used a root that also meant “penis,” and the Proto-Indo-European
term ( *wiro -) used a root that also meant “strength.” Proto-Anatolian and Proto-Indo-European
did, however, share cognate terms for grandfather and daughter, , so their kinship vocabularies over-
lapped. Classic Proto-Indo-European and Anatolian probably emerged from different places and
different times in the Pre-Proto-Indo-Europcan dialect chain.

13. For Pre-Greek language(s) of Greece, see Hainsworth 1972; and Francis 1992.

14. For the oldest language in the Indie branch I use the term Old Indie instead of Indo-
Aryan. The standard nomenclature today is Indo-Iranian for the parent, Avestan Iranian for the
oldest Iranian daughter, and Indo-Aryan for the oldest Indie daughter. But the designation
Aryan for Indie is unnecessary; they were all Aryan. For the language and history of the Rig-
Veda , see Erdosy 1995.

15. For Old Indie terms among the Mitanni, see Thieme 1960; Burrow 1973; and Wilhelm
1995. 1 thank Michael Witzel for his comments on Mitanni names. Any errors are my own.

16. For a date for Zarathustra before 1000 BCE, see Boyce 1975; and Skj*rv 0 1995. For the
“traditional” date promulgated by ancient Greek sources, five hundred years later, see Malandra
1983.

17. Clackson (1994) and Hamp (1998) argued that Pre-Armenian was linked to the Greek-
Indo-Iranian block. See also the isogloss map in Antilla 1972, figure 15.2. Many of the shared
lexical items arc discussed and described in Mallory and Adams 1997. 1 am grateful to Richard
Diebold for his analysis of Greek/lndo-Iranian relations in a long letter of October 1994, where
he pointed out that the shared innovations link Greek and Iranian closely, and Greek and Indie
somewhat less.

18. See Rijksbaron 1988 and Drinka 1995 for the shared poetic functions of the imperfect.
Poetics, shared phrases, and weapon terms are reviewed in Watkins 1995, chap. 2, 435-436.

4J4 Notes to Chapter 4

19. See Ringe et al. 1998; and also Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor 2002. Similar cladistic
methods were applied to a purely lexical data set in Rexovi, Frynta, and Zrzavy 2003.

Chapter 4. Language and Time 2

1. See Darden 2001, esp. 201-204, for the etymology of the term wool. For the actual tex-
tiles, see Barber 2001, 1991; and Good 1998.

2. The “unspinnable" quotation is from Barber 2001:2. The mitochondrial DNA in modern
domesticated sheep indicates that all are descended from two ancient episodes of domestication.
One cluster (B), including all European and Near Eastern sheep, is descended from the wild
Ovis orientalis of eastern Anatolia or western Iran. The other cluster (A) is descended from an-
other Ovis orientalis population, probably in north-central Iran. Other wild Old World ovi-
caprids, Ovis ammon and Ovis vignei, did not contribute to the genes of domesticated sheep. See
Hiendleder et al. 2002. For a general discussion of sheep domestication, see Davis 1987; and
Harris 1996.

3. In the lanna temple of Uruk IV (3400-3100 BCE) artists depicted women making tex-
tiles. The later Sumerian names for some months incorporated the term for plucking sheep. The
zoological evidence suggests that the months were named this way during the Late Uruk period
or afterward, not before.

4. Zoological evidence for wool production in the Near East is reviewed by Pollack
(1999:140-147). For Arslantepe, see Bokonyi 1983. An earlier date for wool sheep could be in-
dicated by a couple of isolated pieces of evidence. The phase A occupation at Hacinebi on the
Euphrates, dated 4100-3800 BCE, had spindle -whorls that seemed the right weight for spin-
ning wool, which requires a light spindle; see Keith 1998. A clay sheep figurine from Tepe
Sarah in western Iran (Kermanshah) seems to show a wooly fleece, from a level dated about
5000 BCE. For a broader discussion, see Good 2001.

5. For the caprids (sheep and/or goats) at Khvalynsk, see Petrenko 1984. Petrenko did not
report the age at death for all the caprids in the Khvalynsk graves, but six of the twelve with
reported ages were adults. Sacrificial deposit #11 contained 139 bones of caprids representing
four adults and five sub-adults, and the average adult withers height was 78 cm, almost 15 cm
taller than other European Neolithic caprids. For Svobodnoe sheep, see Nekhaev 1992:81. For
sheep in Hungary, see Bokonyi 1979:101-116. For sheep in Poland, see Milisauskas 2002:202.

6. For wool at Novosvobodnaya, see Shishlina, Orfinskaya, and Golikov 2003. For evi-
dence of Catacomb-period wool (dated ca. 2800-2200 BCE) in the North Caucasian steppes,
see Shishlina 1999. Sherratt’s updated comments on wool are included in the revised text of an
older article in Sherratt 1997a.

7. The term for hub or nave, which is often included in other lists, also meant “navel" in
Proto-Indo-European, so its exact meaning is unclear. For the wheel-wagon vocabulary, see
Spccht 1944. Three influential updates were Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1984:718-738; Meid
1994; and Hiiusler 1994. 1 first published on the topic in Anthony and Wailes 1988; and also in
Anthony 1991a, 1995a. As with most of the topics covered in this book, there is an excellent
review of the Indo-European wheel vocabulary in Mallory and Adams 1997.

8. Don Ringe communicated the argument against hurki- to me in a letter in 1997. Bill
Darden discussed the Anatolian terms in Darden 2001.

9. I am indebted to Mary Littauer for alerting me to draft experiments carried out in
1838-40 with wagons and carts on different road surfaces, where it was determined that the
draft of a wagon was 1.6 times greater than that of a cart of the same weight. See Ryder 1987.

10. For the earliest wheeled vehicles, see Bakker et al. 1999; and Piggott 1983. For Euro-
pean wheels, see Hausler 1992; and ITayen 1989. For Mesopotamia, see Littauer and Crouwel
1979; and Oates 2001. The most comprehensive anlysis of the steppe vehicle burials, still un-
published, is by Izbitser 1993, a thesis for the Institute of the History of Material Culture in

Notes to Chapter 5 475

St. Petersburg. Izbitser is working on an English-language update from her post in the New
York Metropolitan Museum. Other key steppe accounts are in Melnik and Serdiukova 1988,
and the section on wagons in Gei 2000:175-192.

11. Sherratt’s essays were compiled and amended in Sherratt 1997. He continued to suggest
that horseback riding in the steppes was inspired by Near Eastern donkey riding; see 1997:217.
An early critical response to the SPR is Chapman 1983.

12. For Neolithic sleds in Russia, see Burov 1997. Most of them were joined with mortice-
and-tenon joints, and equipped with bent-wood curved runners. These are the same carpentry
skills needed to make wheels and wooden-slat tires.

13. The version of the Renfrew hypothesis I use here was published as Renfrew 2001. For
assenting views among archaeologists, see Zvelebil and Zvelcbil 1988; Zvclebil 1995; and Robb
1991, 1993. Robert Drews (2001) began in a different place but ended up supporting Renfrew.

14. For the north Syrian origin of the Anatolian Neolithic population, see Bar-Yosef 2002;
for the likely Afro-Asiatic linguistic affiliation of these first farmers, see Militarev 2002.

15. See Gray and Atkinson 2003, reviewed by Balter 2003. The linguist L. Trask criticized
Gray and Atkinson’s methods, and Gray responded on his homepage, updated March 2004, at
http:// www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/psych/research/Evolution/GrayRes.htm.

16. Buck 1949:664, with Indo-European terms for turn , turn around , wind , and roll. Gray’s
argument for a natural independent development of the term wheel from to turn (wheel = the
turner) is further complicated by the fact that there are two reconstructed Proto-Indo-European
terms for wheel , and the other one was based on the Proto-Indo-European verb *reth- ‘run’
(wheel=the runner), a different semantic development.

17. Renfrew 2001:40-45; 2000. Renfrew’s hypothesis of a very long-lived Proto-Indo-
European phase, surviving for many millennia, is supported by some linguists. For a view that
Proto-Indo-European was spoken from the Mesolithic through the end of the Corded Ware
period, or about 6000-2200 BCE, see Kitson 1997, esp. 198-202.

18. Childe 1957:394.

19. Mallory 1989:145-146; and Anthony 1991a. For Africa, see Nettles 1996.

Chapter 5. Language and Place

1. For homeland theories, see Mallory 1989, chap. 6. For political uses of the past in the
Soviet Union, see Shnirelman 1995, 1999; Chernykh 1995; and Kohl and Tsetskhladze 1995.
For the belief in an Aryan-European “race,” see Kiihl 1994; and Poliakov 1974.

2. The Pontic-Caspian steppe homeland hypothesis was defended in English most clearly
by Gimbutas 1970, 1977, 1991; and Mallory 1989, updated in Mallory and Mair 2000. Al-
though I agree with Gimbutas’s homeland solution, I disagree with her chronology, her sug-
gested causes for the expansion, and her concept of Kurgan-culture migrations, as I explained in
detail in Anthony 1986.

3. See Dixon 1997:43-45. Similarly for Zimmer 1990:312-313, “reconstructions are pure
abstracts incapable of being located or dated ... no philological interpretation of the recon-
structed items is possible.”

4. The tree model does not exclude or deny some areal convergence. All languages contain
elements based on both branching structures and convergence with neighbors. On areal bor-
rowing, see Nichols 1992.

5. See Thomason and Kaufman 1992; Nichols 1992; and Dixon 1997. All support the
derivation of the Indo-European languages from Proto-Indo-European. Dixon (1997:31), al-
though a critic of the criteria used to create some family tree models, stated: “The genetic relat-
edness of the Indo-European languages, in a family tree model, has of course been eminently
proved." A good brief review of various approaches to convergence can be found in Hock and
Joseph 1996:388-445.

4J 6 Notes to Chapter 5

6. Gradual convergence between neighboring languages can result in several different
kinds of similarities, depending on the social circumstances. The range of possibilities includes
trade jargons, crude combinations of words from neighboring languages barely sufficient to com-
municate for purposes of trade or barter; pidgins, which evolve from trade jargons or from a
multitude of partially known languages in a colonial encounter where a colonial target language
supplies much of the content of the pidgin; and creoles , which can evolve from pidgins or can
arise abruptly in multiethnic forced labor communities where again a colonial target language
supplies much of the content. Unlike pidgins, creoles contain the essential grammatical struc-
tures of a natural language, but in a reduced and simple form. They can, of course, be as expres-
sive in song, poetry, and metaphor as any natural language, so the fact that they are grammatically
simple is not a value statement. All these ways of speaking pass through a bottleneck of great
grammatical simplification. Indo-European grammar is not at all like a creole grammar. See
Bickerton 1988; and Thomason and Kaufman 1988.

7. Pulgram, in 1959, suggested that the comparative method, applied to the modern Ro-
mance words for coffee , would produce a false Latin root for coffee in Classical Latin. But Pul-
gram’s claim was rebutted by Hall (1960, 1976). Pulgram’s argument was cited in Renfrew
(1987:84-86) but corrected in Diakonov (1988: n. 2).

8. For Pre-Indo-European substrate terms in Balto-Slavic, sec Andersen 2003. For Greek
and pre-Greek place-names, see Hester 1957; Hainsworth 1972; and Renfrew 1998. In northern
Europe, at least three different extinct non-Indo-European languages have been identified: (1)
the “language of Old European hydronomy,” preserved principally in non-Indo-European river
names; (2) the “language of bird names,” preserved in the names of several kinds of birds, includ-
ing the blackbird, lark, and heron, and also in other terms borrowed into early Germanic, Celtic,
and Latin, including the terms for ore and lightning ; and (3) the “language of geminates,” which
survives only in a few odd sounds quite atypical for Indo-European, borrowed principally into
Germanic but also into a few Celtic words, including doubled final consonants and the word-
initial [kn-], as in knob. See Schrijver 2001; Venneman 1994; Huld 1990; Polome 1990; and
Krahe 1954.

* 9. For beech and salmon as terms that limited Proto-Indo-European to northern Europe,
see Thieme 1958. Friedrich 1970 showed that the beech root referred variously to beech, oak, and
elder trees in several branches, and that in any case the common beech grew in the Caucasus
Mountains, making it useless as a diagnostic northern European tree word. Diebold 1985 sum-
marized the evidence against salmon as a limiting geographic term. For the honeybee argu-
ment, see the excellent study by Carpelan and Parpola 2001. Sec also the articles on salmon and
beech in Mallory and Adams 1997.

10. This interpretation of Proto-Indo-European *peku is that of Bcnveniste 1973:40-51.

11. This reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European society is based on Benveniste 1973,
numerous entries in Mallory and Adams 1997, and Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995.

12. For Proto-Uralic linkages with Proto-Indo-European, see Carpelan, Parpola, and
Koskikallio 2001, particularly the articles by Koivulehto and Kallio. See also Janhunen 2000;
Sinor 1988; and Ringc 1997.

13. For a Yeniseian homeland, see Napol’skikh 1997.

14. Koivulehto 2001.

15. Janhunen (2000) has somewhat different forms for some of the pronouns. Nichols
pointed out in a note to me that the -m and -n shared inflections arc not very telling; only a
whole paradigm of shared inflections is diagnostic. Also, nasal consonants occur in high fre-
quencies and apparently are prone to occur in grammatical endings, and so it is the pronouns
that are really important here.

16. Nichols 1997a.

17. For the glotallic theory, see Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1973; see also Hopper 1973. For
their current views, see Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995.

Notes to Chapter 6 477

18. For discussions of the glottalic theory, see Diakonov 1985; Salmons 1993; and Szemere-
nyi 1989.

19. For critical discussions of the Semitic-Proto-Indo-European and Kartvelian-Semitic-
Proto-Indo-European loan words, see Diakonov 1985:122-140; and Nichols 1997a appendix.
On the chronology of the Proto-Kartvelian dispersal or breakup, see Harris 1991.

Chapter 6. The Archaeology of Language

1. My definitions are adapted from Prescott 1987. A different set of definitions was sug-
gested by Parker 2006. He suggested boundary as the general term (what I am calling borders)
and borders a specific term for a political or military boundary (more or less what I am calling
a boundary). Parker tried to base his definitions partly on vernacular understandings of how
these words are normally used, a noble goal; but I disagree that there is any consistency of us-
age in the vernacular, and prefer to use established definitions. In their review of the border-
land literature, Donnan and Wilson (1999:45-46) followed Prescott in using border as the
general or unspecialized term. The classic work to which I owe a great deal of my thinking is
Barth 1969. For archaeological treatments of ethnic borders, see Shennan 1989, and Stark
1998.

2. For the growth of Medieval European regional identities, see Russell 1972; and Bartlett
1993. For the anthropological deconstruction of tribes and bounded cultures, see Fried 1975;
and Wolf 1982, 1984. See also Hill 1992; and Moore 2001. For good archaeological uses of this
border-deconstructing approach to ethnicity see Wells 2001; Florin 2001; MacEachern 2000;
and James 1999.

3. See Hobsbawm 1990; Giddens 1985; and Gcllncr 1973. Giddens (1985:120) famously
referred to the nation-state as a “bordered power-container.” For a different interpretation of
ancient tribes and borders, see Smith 1998. He is accused of being a “primordialist”; see his
defense in chapter 7. Also see Armstrong 1982.

4. For projectile points and language families in South Africa, see Weissner 1983. For a
good review of material culture and ethnicity, see Jones 1997, csp. chap. 6.

5. For New Guineau, see Terrell 2001; see also Terrell, Hunt, and Godsen 1997. For the
original argument that biology, culture, and language were separate and independent, see the
introduction to Boaz 1911. For California, see Jordan and Shennan 2003. For the other exam-
ples, see Silver and Miller 1997:79-98.

6. Persistent frontiers were the subject of a flurry of studies in the 1970s; see Spicer 1971
and a volume dedicated to Spicer by Castile and Kushner 1981. The focus in these papers was
the maintenance of stigmatized minority identities. In archaeology, the long-term persistence
of prehistoric “culture areas” was discussed long ago in Ehrich 1961. The subject was revisited by
Kuna 1991; and Neustupny 1991. My first paper on the subject was Anthony 2001.

7. For the persistence of the Hudson-Valley Iroquoian/Algonkian frontier, see Chilton
1998. For the Linear Pottery frontier, see Zvelebil 2002. For the Jastorf/Halstatt frontier, see
Wells 1999.

8. Emberling (1997) used the term redundant rather than robust for material-culture bor-
ders that were marked in multiple categories of material culture, and he recognized that this
redundancy suggested that these borders were particularly important socially.

9. For Wales, see Mytum 1994; and John 1972. For the genetic border at the Welsh/
English frontier, see Weale et al. 2002. For the border near Basle, see Gallusser 1991. On
Breton culture, see Jackson 1994; and Segalen 1991. For the Gcrman/Romansh frontier in
Italy, see Cole and Wolf 1974.

10. For the Ucayali quotation, see DeBoer 1990:102. For language and genetic correlations,
see Jones 2003.

4j8 Notes to Chapter 6

1 1 . For the Iroquois, see Wolf 1982:167; 1984:394; and, in contrast, see Tuck 1978; Snow 1994;
and Richter 1992. Moore (2001:43) also used intermarriages between Amerindian tribes as an
index of general cultural and linguistic mixing: “These [marriage] data show a continual movement
of people, and hence their genes, language , and culture , from society to society” (emphasis mine).

12. For the borders of functional zones, see Labov 1994. For functional zones, see Cham-
bers and Trudgill 1998; and Britain 2002.

13. See Cole and Wolf 1974:81-282; see also Barth 1969. Cole and Wolf wrote a perceptive
analysis of a persistent frontier in Italy, and then in 1982 Wolf published his best-known book,
which suggested that tribal borders outside Europe were much more porous and changeable. In
making this argument he seems, in my view, to have made some statements contradicted by his
own earlier field work.

14. For the billiard-ball analogy, see Wolf 1982:6, 14. On migration processes generally, see
Anthony 1990, 1997. Archaeologists of the American Southwest have pushed migration theory
further than those of any other region. For a sampling sec Spielmann 1998. For migration the-
ory in Iroquoian archaeology, see Sutton 1996.

15. For the four Colonial cultural provinces, see Fischer 1989; Glassie 1965; and Zelinsky
1973. Although anthropology veered away from cultural geography in the 1980s and 1990s,
historians and folklorists continued to study it. See Upton and Vlach 1986; and Noble 1992. For
a review of the historians’ interest in cultural geography in North America, see Nash 1984.

16. Clark 1994.

17. Kopy toff 1987.

18. For the Nuer, see Kelley 1985. For the effect of changes in bride-price currencies on
basic subsistence economies, see Cronk 1989.

19. On dialect leveling among colonists, see Siegel 1985; Trudgill 1986; and Britain 2004.
The degree of leveling depends on a number of social, economic, and linguistic factors; see Muf-
wene 2001. For Spanish leveling in the Americas, see Penny 2000. On the history of American
English dialects, see Fischer 1989.

20. For charter groups, see Porter 1965; and Breen 1984. On German immigrants in Ohio,
see Wilhelm 1992. On Puritan charter groups in new England, see Fischer 1989:57-68. On the
Maya, see Fox 1987, although now there are criticisms of Fox’s migration-based history; on apex
families, see Alvarez 1987; and on the Pueblo, see Schlegel 1992.

21. On leveling and simplification in material culture among colonists, see Noble 1992; and
Upton and Vlach 1986. Burmeister (2000) noted that the external form of residential architec-
ture tends to conform to broad norms, whereas ethnicity is expressed in internal details of deco-
ration and ornament.

22. The Boasian approach to borders is reviewed in Bashkow 2004.

23. On the provinces of France, see Chambers and Trudgill 1998:109-123; on the Maasai,
see Spear and Waller 1993; on Burma, see Leach 1968, 1960; and for a different interpretation
of Burma, see Lehman 1989.

24. On language and ecology, see Hill 1996; and Nettles 1996. Hill’s paper was published
later in Terrell 2001:257-282. AJso see Milroy 1992.

25. The concept of ecologically determined “spread zones” for languages came from Nichols
1992. Similar ideas about arid zones and language expansion can be found in Silver and Miller
1997:79-83. Renfrew (2002) applied the term spread zone to any region of rapid language
spread, particularly any expansion of pioneer farmers, regardless of ecology. Campbell (2002),
however, warned against mixing these definitions.

26. For China, see DiCosmo 2002; and Lattimore 1940.

27. For Acholi origins, see Atkinson 1989, 1994.

28. A similar model for the growth of Bronze Age chiefdoms, described long before Atkin-
son’s case study was published, was by Gilman 1981.

29. For the Pathan-Baluch shift, see Mallory 1992; Barth 1972; and Noelle 1997.

Notes to Chapter 8 479

Chapter 7. How to Reconstruct a Dead Culture

1. For the history of Christian J. Thomsen’s Three-Age System, see Bibby 1956.

2. I generally follow the Eneolithic and Bronze Age chronology of Victor Trifonov at the
Institute of the History of Material Culture in St. Petersburg; see Trifonov 2001.

3. For the impact of radiocarbon dating on our understanding of European prehistory, see
Renfrew 1973.

4. The old carbon problem in freshwater fish is explained in Cook et al. 2002; and in Bon-
sall et al. 2004. 1 used their method to create the correction scale that appears in the appendix.

5. A good historical review of radiocarbon dating in Russian archaeology is in Zaitseva,
Timofeev, and Sementsov 1999.

6. For a good example of cultural identity shifting in response to changing historical situ-
ations, see Haley and Wilcoxon 2005. For Eric Wolf’s and Anthony Smith’s comments on situ-
ational politics alone being insufficient to explain emotional ties to a cultural identity see Cole
and Wolf 1974:281-282; and Smith 1998, chap. 7.

7. For technological style and cultural borders, see Stark 1998.

Chapter 8. First Farmers and Herders

1. The three sky gods named here almost certainly can be ascribed to Proto-Indo-European.
Dyeus Pater , or Sky/Heaven Father, is the most certain. The Thunder/War god was named differ-
ently in different dialects but in each branch was associated with the thunderbolt, the hammer or
club, and war. The Divine Twins likewise were named differently in the different branches — the
Nasatyas in Indie, Kastor and Polydeukes in Greek, and the Dieva Deli in Baltic. They were as-
sociated with good luck, and often were represented as twin horses, the offspring of a divine
mare. ForTrita, see Watkins 1995; and Lincoln 1981:103-124. More recently, see Lincoln 1991,
chap. 1. For the twins, see Puhvel 1975; and Mallory and Adams 1997:161-165.

2. For the tripartition of Indo-European society, see Dumezil 1958; and Littleton 1982.
There is a good review in Mallory 1989:128-142. For an impressive example of the interweaving
of three’s and two’s in Indo-European poetry, see Calvert Watkins analysis of a traditional
Latin poem preserved by Cato in 160 BCE, the “Lustration of the Fields.” The structure is tri-
partite, expressed in a series of doubles. See Watkins 1995:202-204.

3. Przewalkski horses are named after the Polish colonel who first formally described them
in 1881. A Russian noble, Frederic von Falz-fein, and a German animal collector, Carl Hagen-
beck, captured dozens of them in Mongolia, in 1899 and 1901. All modern Przewalski’s are
descended from about 15 of these animals. Their wild cousins were hunted to extinction after
World War II; the last ones were sighted in Mongolia in 1969. Zoo-bred populations were rein-
troduced to two preserves in Mongolia in 1992, where once again they are thriving.

4. For differences between east-Ural and west-Ural Upper Paleolithic cultures, see Boris-
kovskii 1993, and Lisitsyn 1996.

5. For a wide-ranging study of the Ice Age Caspian, the Khvalynian Sea, and the Black
Sea, including the “Noah’s Flood” hypothesis, see Yanko-Hombach et al. 2006.

6. For the decline of matriliny among cattle herders, see Holden and Mace 2003.

7. For Y-chromosome data on early European cattle, see Gotherstrom et al. 2005. For
MtDNA, see Troy et al. 2001; and Bradley et al. 1996.

8. For agricultural frontier demography, see Lefferts 1977; and Simkins and Wernstedt
1971.

9. For the oldest Cri§ site in the lower Danube valley, see Nica 1977. For a Starcevo settle-
ment in the plains north of Belgrade, see Greenfield 1994.

480 Notes to Chapter 8

10. For Cri$ immigrants in the East Carpathians, see Dergachev, Sherratt, and Larina
1991; Kuzminova, Dergachev, and Larina 1998; Telcgin 1996; and Ursulescu 1984. The count
of thirty sites refers to excavated sites. Cri§ pottery is known in unexcavatcd surface exposures
at many more sites listed in Ursulescu 1984. For the Cri§ economy in eastern Hungary, see
Voros 1980.

11. For Neolithic bread, sec Wahren 1989. Cri$ people cultivated gardens containing four
varieties of domesticated wheat: Triticum monococcum , T dxcoccum Shrank, T spelt a > T. aestivo-
compactum Schieman; as well as barley {Horde urn), millet {Panicum miliaceum ), and peas ( Pisum )—
all foreign to eastern Europe. On the plant evidence, see Yanushevich 1989; and Pashkevich
1992.

12. Markevich 1974:14.

13. For the possible role of acculturated foragers in the origin of the East Carpathian Cri$
culture, see Dergachev, Sherratt, and Larina 1991; and, more emphatically, Zvclebil and Lillie
2000.

14. On pioneer farmers and language dispersal, see Bcllwood and Renfrew 2002; Bcllwood
2001; Renfrew 1996; and Nichols 1994. On the symbolic opposition of wild and domesticated
animals, see Hodder 1990.

15. Most archaeologists have accepted the argument made by Perles (2001) that the Greek
Neolithic began with a migration of farmers from Anatolia. For the initial spread from Greece
into the Balkans, see Fiedel and Anthony 2003. Also see Zvelebil and Lillie 2000; and van
Andcl and Runnels 1995. The practical logistics of a Neolithic open-boat crossing of the
Aegean are discussed in Broodbank and Strasser 1991.

16. For 'tawro-s, sec Nichols 1997a: appendixes. For the association of Afro-Asiatic with
the initial Neolithic, see Militarev 2003.

17. The classic Russian-language works on the Bug-Dniester culture are in Markevich 1974;
and Danilenko 1971; the classic discussion in English is in Tringham 1971. More recently, see
Telegin 1977, 1982, and 1996; and Wechler, Dergachev, and Larina 1998.

18. For the Mesolithic groups around the Black Sea, see Tclegin 1982; and Kol’tsov 1989.
On the Dobrujan Mesolithic, sec Paunescu 1987. For zoological analyses, see Benecke 1997.

19. Most of the dates for the earliest Elshanka sites arc on shell, which might need correc-
tion for old carbon. Corrected, Elshanka dates might come down as low as 6500-6200 BCE.
Sec Mamonov 1995, and other articles in the same edited volume. For radiocarbon dates, see
1 imofeev and Zaitseva 1997. Por the technology and manufacture of this silt/mud/clay pottery,
sec Bobrinskii and Vasilicva 1998.

20. For the dates from Rakushcchni Yar, sec Zaitseva, Timofeev, and Scmentsov 1999. For
the excavations at Rakushechni Yar, see Belanovskaya 1995. Rakushechni Yar was a deeply
stratified dune site. Tclegin (1981) described sedimentary stratum 14 as the oldest cultural oc-
cupation. A series of new radiocarbon dates, which 1 ignore here, have been taken from organic
residues that adhered to pottery vessels said to derive from levels 9 to 20. Levels 15 to 20 would
have been beneath the oldest cultural level, so I am unsure about the context of the pottery. These
dates were in the calibrated range of 7200-5800 BCE (7930±130 to 6825±100 BP). If they are
correct, then this pottery is fifteen hundred years older than the other pottery like it, and domes-
ticated sheep appeared in the lower Don valley by 7000 BCE. All domesticated sheep are gene-
tically proven to have come from a maternal gene pool in the mountains of eastern Turkey,
northern Syria, and Iraq about 8000-7500 BCE, and no domesticated sheep appeared in the
Caucasus, northwestern Anatolia, or anvwhere else in Europe in any site dated as early as 7000
BCE. The earliest dates on charcoal from Rakushechni Yar (6070+100 BP, 5890+105 BP for
level 8) come out about 5200—4800 BCE, in agreement with other dates for the earliest domes-
ticated animals in the steppes. If the dated organic residue was full of boiled fish, it could need a
correction of five hundred radiocarbon years, which would bring the earliest dates down to about
6400-6200 BCE somewhat more reasonable. I think the dates are probably contaminated and
the sheep are mixed down from upper levels.

Notes to Chapter 8 481

21. For 155 Late Mesolithic and Neolithic radiocarbon dates from Ukraine, see Telegin
et al. 2002, 2003.

22. On Bug-Dniester plant foods, see Yanushcvichl989; and Kuzminova, Dergachev, and
Larina 1998. A report of millet and barley impressions from the middle-phase site of Soroki 1/
level la is contained in Markevich 1965. Yanushevich did not include this site in her 1989 list of
Bug-Dniester sites with domesticated seed imprints; it is the only Bug-Dniester site I have seen
with reports of barley and millet impressions.

23. The dates here are not on human bones, so they need no correction. The bone percent-
ages are extracted from Table 7 in Markevich 1974; and Benecke 1997. Benecke dismissed the
Soviet-era claims that pigs or cattle or both were domesticated independently in the North
Pontic region. Tclegin (1996:44) agreed. Mullino in the southern Urals produced domesticated
sheep bones supposedly dated to 7000 BCE, cited by Matiushin (1986) as evidence for migra-
tions from Central Asia; but like the claimed sheep in deep levels at Rakushechni Yar, these
sheep would have been earlier than their proposed parent herds at Djeitun, and the wild species
was not native to Russia. The sheep bones probably came from later Eneolithic levels. Mati-
ushin’s report was criticized for stratigraphic inconsistencies. See Matiushin 1986; and, for his
critics, Vasiliev, Vybornov, and Morgunova 1985; and Shorin 1993.

24. Zvelebil and Rowley-Conwy 1984.

25. For captured women and their hyper-correct stylistic behavior, sec DeBoer 1986. The
archaeological literature on technological style is vast, but a good introduction is in Stark
1998.

26. The Linear Pottery culture in the East Carpathian piedmont overlapped with the Cri$
culture around 5500-5400 BCE. This is shown at late Cri$ sites like Grumaze§ti and Sakarovka
that contained a few Linear Pottery sherds. Sakarovka also had Bug-Dniester sherds, so it
shows the brief contemporaneity of all three groups.

27. There is, of course, generosity and sharing among farmers, but farmers also understand
that certain potential foods are not food at all but investments. Generosity with food has practi-
cal limits in bad times among farmers; these are generally absent among foragers. See Peterson
1993; and Rosenberg 1994.

28. The classic text on the Dniepcr-Donets culture is Telegin 1968. For an English-language
monograph see Telegin and Potekhina. In this chapter I only discuss the first phase, Dnieper-
Donets I.

29. For DDI chipped axes, see Neprina 1970; and Telegin 1968:51-54.

30. Vasilievka V was published as a Dnicper-Donets II cemetery, but its radiocarbon dates
suggest that it should have dated to DD I. Vasilievka I and III were published as Late Mesolithic,
broadly around 7000-6000 BCE, but have radiocarbon dates of the very Early Mesolithic,
closer to 8000 BCE. Vasilievka II and Marievka were published as Neolithic but have no ce-
ramics and Late Mesolithic radiocarbon dates, 6500-6000 BCE, and so are probably Late
Mesolithic. Changes in human skeletal morphology that were thought to have occurred be-
tween the Late Mesolithic and Neolithic (Jacobs 1993) now appear to have occurred between
the Early and Late Mesolithic. These revisions in chronology have not generally been acknowl-
edged. For radiocarbon dates, see Telegin et al. 2002, 2003. See also Jacobs 1993, and my reply
in Anthony 1994.

31. For Varfolomievka, see Yudin 1998, 1988.

32. The zoologist Bibikova identified domesticated animals — sheep, cattle, and horses — at
Matveev Kurgan in levels dated 6400-6000 BCE. Today neither the German zoologist Be-
necke nor the Llkrainian archaeologist Telegin give credit to Bibikova’s claims for an indepen-
dent local domestication of animals in Ukraine. Matveev Kurgan (a settlement, not a kurgan) is
located in the Mius River valley north of the Sea of Azov, near Mariupol. Two sites were exca-
vated between 1968 and 1973, numbered 1 and 2. Both contained Grcbcnikov-type microlithic
flint tools and were thought to be contemporary. Two radiocarbon dates from MK 1 average
about 6400-6000 BCE, but the single date (on bone) from MK 2 was about 4400-4000 BCE.

482 Notes to Chapter 9

In the latter period domesticated animals including sheep were common in the region. The ar-
tifacts from all depths were analyzed and reported as a single cultural deposit. But at MK 1 the
maximum number of flint tools and animal bones was found at a depth of 40-70 cm (Krizhevs-
kaya 1991:8), and the dwelling floor and hearths were at 80-110 cm (Krizhevskaya 1991:16).
Most of the animal bones from MK 1 and 2 were from wild animals, principally horses, ona-
gers, and wild pigs, and these probably were associated with the older dates. But the bones
identified as domesticated horses, cattle, and sheep probably came from later levels associated
with the later date. See Krizhevskaya 1991. Stratigraphic inconsistencies mar the reporting of
all three Pontic-Ural sites with claimed very early domesticated animals — Rakushechni Yar,
Mullino, and Matveev Kurgan.

Chapter 9. Cows, Copper, and Chiefs

1. Benvcnistc 1973:61-63 for feasts; also see the entry for GIVE in Mallory and Adams
1997:224-225; and the brief recent review by Fortson 2004:19-21.

2. The dates defining the beginning of the Eneolithic in the steppes are principally from
human bone, whereas the dates from Old Europe are not. The date of 5200-5000 BCE for the
beginning of the Eneolithic Dnieper-Donets II culture incorporates a reduction of -228 ±30
radiocarbon years prior to recalibration. There is a discussion of this below in note 16.

3. “Old Europe" was a term revived by Marija Gimbutas, perhaps originally to distinguish
Neolithic European farming cultures from Near Eastern civilizations, but she also used the
term to separate southeastern Europe from all other European Neolithic regions. See Gimbu-
tas 1991, 1974. For chronologies, economy, environment, and site descriptions, sec Bailey and
Panayotov 1995; and Lichardus 1991. For the origin of the term Altcuropa see Schuchhardt
1919.

4. Most of these dates are on charcoal or animal bone and so need no correction. The earli-
est copper on the Volga is at Khvalynsk, which is dated by human bone that tested high in 15 N
(mean 14.8%) and also seemed too old, from about 5200-4700 BCE, older than most of the
copper in southeastern Europe, which was the apparent source of the Khvalynsk copper. I have
subtracted four hundred radiocarbon years from the original radiocarbon dates to account for
reservoir effects, making the Khvalynsk cemetery date 4600-4200 BCE, which accords better
with the florescence of the Old European copper age and therefore makes more sense.

5. For the pathologies on cattle bones indicating they were used regularly for heavy draft,
see Ghetic and Matccsco 1973; and Marinescu-Bilcu et al. 1984.

6. For signs and notation, see Gimbutas 1989; and Winn 1981. The best book on female
figurines is Pogozhcva 1983.

7. Copper tools were found in Early Eneolithic Slatina in southwestern Bulgaria, and cop-
per ornaments and pieces of copper ore (malachite) were found in Late Neolithic Hamangia IIB
on the Black Sea coast in the Dobruja hills south of the Danube delta, both probably dated
about 5000 BCE. For Old European metals in Bulgaria, see Pernicka et al. 1997. For the mid-
dle Danube, sec Glumac and Todd 1991. For general overviews of Eneolithic metallurgy, see
Chernykh 1992; and Ryndina 1998.

8. For vegetation changes during the Eneolithic, see Willis 1994; Marinescu-Bilcu, Carci-
umaru, and Muraru 1981; and Bailey et al. 2002.

9. Krcmcnetski et al. 1999; see also Kremenetskii 1997. For those who follow the “beech
line" argument in Indo-European origin debates, these pollen studies indicate that Atlantic-
period beech forests grew in the Dniester uplands and probably spread as far west as the
Dnieper.

10. For the ceramic sequence, see Ellis 1984:48 and n. 3. The Pre-Cucutcni I phase was
defined initially on the basis of ceramics from one site, Traian-Dealul Viei; small amounts of

Notes to Chapter 9 48J

similar ceramics were found later at four other sites, and so the phase probably is valid. For an
overview of the Tripolye culture, see Zbenovich 1996.

11. Marinescu-Bilcu et al. 1984.

12. Some Tripolye A settlements in the South Bug valley (Lugach, Gard 3) contained
sherds of Bug-Dniester pottery, and others had a few flint microlithic blades like Bug-Dniester
forms. These traces suggest that some late Bug-Dniester people were absorbed into Tripolye A
villages in the South Bug valley. But late Bug-Dniester pottery was quite different in paste,
temper, firing, shape, and decoration from Tripolye pottery, so the shift to using Tripolye
wares would have been an obvious and meaningful act. For the absence of Bug-Dniester traits
in Tripolye material culture, see Zbenovich 1980:164-167; and for Lugach and Gard 3, see
Tovkailo 1990.

13. For Bernashevka, see Zbenovich 1980. For the Tripolye A settlement ofLuka-Vrublevetskaya,
see Bibikov 1953.

14. For the Karbuna hoard, see Dergachev 1998.

15. Tie Early Eneolithic cultures 1 describe in this section are also called Late Neolithic or
Neo-Encolithic. Telegin (1987) called the DDII cemeteries of the Mariupol-Nikol’skoe type
Late Neolithic, and Yudin (1988) identified Varfolomievka levels 1 and 2 as Late Neolithic. But
in the 1990s Tclegin began to use the term “Neo-Eneolithic” for DDII sites, and Yudin (1993)
started calling Varfolomievka an Eneolithic site. I have to accept these changes, so sites of
Mariupol-Nikolskoe (DDII) type and all sites contemporary with them, including Khvalynsk
and Varfolomievka, are called Early Eneolithic. The Late Neolithic apparently has disappeared.
The terminological sequence in this book is Early Neolithic (Surskii), Middle Neolithic (Bug-
Dniester-DDl), Early Eneolithic (Tripolye A-DDII-Khvalynsk), and Late Eneolithic (Tripolye
B, Cl-Srcdni Stog-Repin). For key sites in the Dnieper-Azov region, see Telegin and Potekhina
1987; and Tclegin 1991. For sites on the middle Volga, see Vasiliev 1981; and Agapov, Vasiliev,
and Pestrikova 1990. In the Caspian Depression, see Yudin 1988, 1993.

16. The average level of l5 N in DDII human bones is 11.8 percent, which suggests an aver-
age offset of about -228 ±30 BP, according to the method described in the appendix. I sub-
tracted 228 radiocarbon years from the BP dates for the DDII culture and calibrated them
again. The unmodified dates from the earliest DDII cemeteries (Dereivka, Yasinovatka) sug-
gested a calibrated earliest range of 5500-5300 BCE (sec Table 9.1), but these dates always
seemed too early. They would equate DDII with the middle Bug-Dniester and Cri§ cultures.
But DDII came for the most part after Bug-Dniester, during the Tripolye A period. The modi-
fied radiocarbon dates for Dnieper-Donets II fit better with the stratigraphic data and with the
Tripolye A sherds found in Dnieper-Donets II sites. For lists of dates, sec Trifonov 2001; Ras-
samakin 1999; and Telegin et al. 2002, 2003.

17. For lists of fauna, see Benecke 1997:637-638; see also Tclegin 1968:205-208. For 15 N in
the bones, sec Lillie and Richards 2000. Western readers might be confused by statements in
English that the DDII economy was based on hunting and fishing (Zvelebil and Lillie 2000:77;
Tclegin, et al. 2003:465; and Levine 1999:33). The DDII people ate cattle and sheep in percent-
ages between 30% and 78% of the animal bones in their garbage pits. Benecke (1997:637), a
German zoologist, examined many of the North Pontic bone collections himself and concluded
that domesticated animals “first became evident in faunal assemblages that are synchronized
with level II of the Dnieper-Donets culture." People who kept domesticated animals were no
longer hunter-gatherers.

18. Flint blades 5-14 cm long with sickle gloss are described by Telegin (1968:144). The
northwestern DDII settlements with seed impressions are listed in Pashkevich 1992, and
Okhrimenko and Telegin 1982. DDII dental caries are described in Lillie 1996.

19. Telegin 1968:87.

20. The Vasilievka II cemetery was recently dated by radiocarbon to the Late Mesolithic,
about 7000 BCE. The cemetery was originally assigned to the DDII culture on the basis of

484 Notes to Chapter 9

a few details of grave construction and burial pose. Telegin ct al. 2002 extended the label
“Mariupol culture” back to include Vasilievka II, but it lacks all the artifact types and many
of the grave features that define DDII-Mariupol graves. The DDII cemeteries are securely
dated to a period after 5400-5200 BCE. Vasilievka II is Late Mesolithic.

21. For funeral feasts, see Telegin and Potekhina 1987:35-37, 113, 130.

22. I have modified Khvalynsk dates on human bone to account for the very high average
1S N in human bone from Khvalynsk, which we measured at 14.8%, suggesting that an average
-408 ±52 radiocarbon years should be subtracted from these dates before calibrating them
(see Authors Note on Dating, and chapter 7). After doing this I came up with dates for the
Khvalynsk cemetery of 4700/4600-4200/4100 BCE, which makes it overlap with Srcdni
Stog, as many Ukrainian and Russian archaeologists thought it should on stylistic and typo-
logical grounds. It also narrows the gap between late Khvalynsk on the lower Volga (now
3600-3400 BCE) and earliest Yamnaya. See Agapov, Vasilicv, and Pestrikova 1990; and
Rassamakin 1999.

23. Until Khvalynsk II is published, the figure of forty three graves is conditional. I was
given this figure in conversation.

24. For the enhancement of male status with herding economies, see Holden and Mace
2003.

25. In Anthony and Brown (2000) we reported a smaller number of horses, cattle, and sheep
from the cemetery at Khvalynsk, based on only the twelve “ritual deposits” placed above the
graves. I later compiled the complete animal bone reports from two sources: Petrenko 1984; and
Agapov, Vasiliev, and Pestrikova 1990, tables 1, 2. They presented conflicting descriptions of
the numbers of sheep in ritual deposits 10 and 11, and this discrepancy resulted in a total count
of either fifty-two or seventy sheep MNI.

26. See Ryndina 1998:151-159, for Khvalynsk I and II metals.

27. For ornaments see Vasilicv 2003.

28. For the possibility that the first domesticated animals came across the North Caucasus
from the Near East, see Shnirelman 1992; and Jacobs 1993; and, in opposition, sec An-
thonyl994.

29. Yanushevich 1989.

30. Nalchik is described in Gimbutas 1956:51-53.

31. I found this grave referenced in Gei 2000:193.

32. The bones at Dzhangar were originally reported to contain domesticated cattle, but the
zoologist Pavel Kosintsev told me, in 2001, that they were all onager and horse, with no obvious
domesticates.

33. The Neolithic cultures of the North Caspian Depression, east of the Volga, were first
called the Seroglazivka culture by Melent’ev (1975). Seroglazivka included some Neolithic for-
ager camps similar to Dzhangar and later sites with domesticated animal bones like Varfolomi-
evka. Yudin suggested in 1998 that a new label, “Orlovka culture,” should be applied to the
Early Encolithic sites with domesticated animals. On Varfolomicvka, see Yudin 1998, 1988.
Razdorskoe was described by Kiyashko 1987. Older bur still informative is Telegin 1981.

34. The Orlovka site was first described by Mamontov 1974.

35. The Samara Neolithic culture, with the cemetery of S’yezzhe, usually is placed earlier
than Khvalynsk, as one S’yezzhe grave contained a boars-tusk plaque exactly like a DDII type.
Radiocarbon dates now indicate that early Khvalynsk overlapped with the late Samara Neo-
lithic (and late DDII). Tie Samara Neolithic settlement of Gundurovka contained Khvalynsk
pottery. The Samara culture might have begun before Khvalynsk; see Vasiliev and Ovchin-
nikova 2000. For S’yezzhe, see Vasiliev and Matveeva 1979. For animal bones, see Petrenko
1984:149; and Kuzmina 2003.

Notes to Chapter 10 485

Chapter 10 . The Domestication of the Horse
and the Origins of Riding

1. Sec Clayton and Lee 1984; and Clayton 1985. For a recent update, see Manfredi, Clay-
ton, and Rosenstein 2005.

2. For early descriptions of bit wear, see Clutton-Brock 1974; and Azzaroli 1980. Doubts
about the causes of this kind of wear had been expressed by Payne (1995) in a study published
after long delays.

3. Wc were provided with horse teeth by Mindy Zcder at the Smithsonian Institution,
the Large Mammal Veterinary Facility at Cornell University; the University of Pennsylva-
nia’s New Bolton Veterinary Center; the Bureau of Land Management, Winncmucca, Ne-
vada; and Ron Keiper of Pennsylvania State University. We learned mold-making and casting
procedures from Sandi Olsen and Pat Shipman, then at Johns Hopkins University. Mary Lit-
tauer gave us invaluable advice and the use of her unparalleled library. Our first steps were
supported by grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the American Philosophical
Society.

4/ On horse MtDNA, see Jansen et al. 2002; and Vila et al. 2001. For horse Y-chromo-
somes, see Lindgren et al. 2004.

5. For equids in Anatolia, sec Summers 2001; and online reports on the Catal Hoyuk proj-
ect. For horses in Europe, see Benecke 1994; and Peske 1986.

6. For Mesolithic and Neolithic Pontic-Caspian horses, sec Benecke 1997; Vasilicv, Vy-
bornov, and Komarov 1996; and Vasilev 1998. For horse bones at Ivanovskaya in the Samara
Neolithic, see Morgunova 1988. In the same volume, see I. Kuzmina 1988.

7. For Mongol horse keeping, see Sinor 1972; and Smith 1984. For horses and cattle in the
blizzard of 1886, see Rydcn 1978:160-162. For feral horses see also Berger 1986.

8. For a review of these methods, see Davis 1987. For riding-related pathologies in verte-
brae, see Levine 1999b. For crib-biting, see Bahn 1980; and the critique in White 1989.

9. The graphs from Benecke and von den Driesch (2003) are combined and reprinted as
figure 10.3 here. See also Bokonyi 1974. For a critical view of Dereivka, see Uerpmann 1990.

10. The ratio of females to males in a harem band, counting immature horses, should be
about 2:1, but the skeletons of immature males cannot be assigned a sex as the canine teeth do
not erupt until about four to five years of age, and the presence of erupted canines is the
principal way to identify males. From the bones, a harem band would contain just one iden-
tifiable male.

11. A horse’s age at death can be estimated from a loose molar by measuring the molar
crown height, the length of the tooth from the bifurcation between the roots to the occlusal
surface. This measurement decreases with age as the tooth wears down. Spinage (1972) was the
first to publish crown height-versus-age statistics for equids, based on zebras; Levine (1982)
published statistics for a small sample of horses using measurements from X-rays. We largely
confirmed Levine’s numbers with direct measurements on our larger sample. But wc found
that estimates based only on crown heights have at best a±1.5 year degree of uncertainty (a
three-year span). The crown height on the right and left Pys of the same horse can vary by as
much as 5 mm, which would normally be interpreted as indicating a difference in age of more
than three years. See note 18, below.

12. Bibikova (1967, 1969) noted that fifteen of seventeen scxable mandibles were male. I
subtracted the cult stallion, an Iron Age intrusion, making fourteen of sixteen males. Bibikova
never published a complete description of the Dereivka horse bones, but she did note that the
MNI was fifty-two individuals; 23% of the population was aged one to two years (probably
looking at long bone fusion); fifteen of seventeen sexablc jaw fragments were from males older
than five, as this is when the canine teeth emerge; and there were no very old individuals.

486 Notes to Chapter 10

Levine’s agc-at-death statistics were based on the crown heights of all the teeth kept in 1998,
with an MNI of only sixteen — about two-thirds of the original collection had been lost. Only
7% of this remnant population was one to two years of age based on long-bone fusion (1999b:34)
and about one-third of the surviving teeth were from the Iron-Age cult stallion. For Levine’s
age-at-death graphs, see Levine 1990, 1999a, 1999b.

13. The analysis of the equid P 2 s from Leisey was conducted by Christian George as part of
his MA Thesis in Geosciences at the University of Florida. The 1.5 -million-year-old Leisey
equids were Equus “leidyi,” possibly an eastern variant of Equus scotti , a common member of the
Rancholabrean fauna, very similar in dentition, diet and stature to true horses. Of the 113 P2s
from this site, 39 were eliminated because of age, damage, or pathologies, leaving 74 measurable
P 2 s from mature equids. See George 2002; Anthony, Brown, and George 2006; and Hulbert,
Morgan, and Webb 1995. Our collection of P 2 s was assembled through the generosity of the
New Bolton Center at the University of Pennsylvania, the Cornell University College of Vet-
erinary Medicine, the Bureau of Land Management in Winnemucca, NE; and Ron Keiper,
then at Pennsylvania State University.

14. We are grateful to the National Science Foundation for supporting the riding experi-
ment, and to the State University of New York at Cobleskill for hosting and managing it. Dr.
Steve MacKenzie supervised the project, and the riding and recording was done by two students
in the Horse Training and Behavior Program, Stephanie Skargensky and Michelle Beleyea. The
bone bit and antler cheekpieces were made with flint tools by Paul Trotta. The hemp rope was
supplied by Vagn Noeddlund of Randers Ropeworks. Mary Littauer and Sandra Olsen pro-
vided valuable suggestions on bits and mold-making. All errors were our own.

15. The pre-experiment, never-bitted mean bevel measurement for the three horses bitted
with soft bits was 1.1 mm, the same as the never-bitted Pleistocene Leisey equids. The standard
deviation for the three was 0.42 mm. The post-experiment mean was 2.04 mm, more than two
standard deviations greater than the pre-experiment mean. Another 300 hours of riding might
have created a bevel of 3 mm, our threshold for archaeological specimens.

16. The 74 never-bitted equid teeth from Leisey exhibited a greater range of variation than
the 31 never-bitted modern P,s we collected, not surprising with a larger sample. The distribu-
tion of measurements was normal, and a t-Test of the difference between the means for our
bitted sample and the Leisey sample showed a significant difference. The threshold of 3 mm for
identifying bit wear in archaeological specimens is supported by the Leisey data.

17. Levine outlined six problems with our bit wear studies in 1999b:ll-12 and 2004:117-
120. She placed it in a category she termed “false direct evidence,” with so-called bridle cheek-
pieces whose forms vary wildly and whose function is entirely speculative. We believe Levine’s
criticisms are based on factual errors, distortions, and misunderstandings. For our reply to each
of her six criticisms, see Anthony, Brown, and George 2006. We remain confident in our analy-
sis of bit wear.

18. Permanent horse P2s become flattened or “tabled” by occlusion with the opposing tooth
gradually between two and three years of age. Brown determined that a P 2 with a crown height
greater than 5.0 mm ami an occlusal length-to-width ratio greater than 2.1 is probably from a
horse three years old or younger, so should be excluded from studies of bit wear (Brown and
Anthony 1998:338-40). Brown was the first to combine the crown height and the occlusal
length-width ratio to produce an age-at-death estimate this precise. If she had not done this we
would have been forced to discard half of our sample to avoid using 2-3-year-old teeth. Chris-
tian George also used Brown’s method to eliminate young teeth (< 3 yr) from the Leisey sample.
It should be noted that George found one P 2 with a bevel of 3.05 mm, but it was probably from
a horse less than three years old.

19. Bendrey (2007), as this book went to press, reported new bevel measurements on never-
bitted Przewalski horses, from zoos in England and Prague. Bendrey measured 29 P 2 s from 15
Przewalksi horses of acceptable age (>3 and <21), and found 3mm bevels on three, or 10%. We
found one bevel of almost 3mm in 105 never-bitted P 2 s, less than 1%. The Przewalski bevels all

Notes to Chapter 10 487

were caused by malocclusion with the opposing upper P 2 ; one 3mm bevel was filed down as a
veterinary treatment for underbite. Malocclusion occurred among zoo-kept Przewalskis more
frequently than among Pleistocene equids or Nevada mustangs. All zoo Przewalskis are de-
scended from about 15 captured in the wild, and these founders might have had unusually bad
occlusion. Also domestic horses were bred with the founders, perhaps mixing genes for different
tooth and jaw sizes.

20. Raulwing 2000:61, with references.

21. For Dereivka, see Telegin 1986. For the horse bones, see Bibikova 1967, 1970; Bokonyi
1974, 1978, 1979; and Nobis 1971.

22. For criticisms of the traditional evidence for horse domestication at Dereivka, see
Anthony 1986, 1991b; and Levine 1990.

23. Our research at the Institute of Zoology in Kiev was hosted by a generous and thoughtful
Natalya Belan; in Samara, Russia, by Igor Vasiliev; and in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, by Victor
Zaibert. In Budapest Sandor Bokonyi made us welcome in the gracious manner for which he was
widely known and is widely missed. The project was supported by a grant from the National Science
Foundation. For reports, see Anthony and Brown 1991; and Anthony, Telegin, and Brown 1991.

24. See Hausler 1994.

25. For the redating of the Dereivka cult stallion, see Anthony and Brown 2000; reiterated
in Anthony and Brown 2003.

26. Both Botai and Tersek showed some influence in their ceramics from forager cultures
of the forest-steppe zone in the southeastern Urals, known as Ayatskii, Lipchin, and Surtanda.
Botai-Tersck might have originated as a southern, steppe-zone offshoot of these cultures. For a
description of Botai and Tersek in English, see Kislenko and Tatarintseva 1999; in Russian, see
Zaibert 1993. For discussions of the horse remains at Botai and related sites, see Olsen 2003;
and Brown and Anthony 1998.

27. Our initial measurements of the horse teeth from Kozhai 1 (made in a hotel room in
Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan) produced one tooth with a 3 mm bevel. This is how we described
the Kozhai results before 2006. We remeasured the twelve Kozhai 1 casts for Anthony, Brown,
and George 2006, and agreed that a borderline 2.9+ measurement was actually 3 mm, resulting
in two teeth with bit wear. Two other P 2 s from Kozhai 1 measured 2 mm or more, an unusually
high measurement among wild horses.

28. Describing the Botai horses as wild were Levine 1999a, 1999b; Benecke and von den
Dreisch 2003; and Ermolova, in Akhinzhalov, Makarova, and Nurumov 1992.

29. See Olsen 2003:98-101.

30. French and Kousoulakou 2003:113.

31. The Atbasar Neolithic preceded Botai in the northern Kazakh steppes; see Kislenko and
Tatarintseva 1999. Benecke and von den Dreisch (2003: table 6.3) reported that domesticated
sheep and cattle bones were found in Atbasar sites in the Kazakh steppes, dated before Botai.
This is true, but the Russian and Kazakh authors they cite described the bones of domesticated
sheep and cattle as later intrusions in the Neolithic levels; they were less weathered than the
bones of the wild animals. The animal bones from Atbasar sites are interpreted by Akhinzhalov,
Makarova, and Nurumov as indicating a foraging economy based on wild horses, short-horned
bison, saiga antelope, gazelle, red deer, and fish. Domesticated animals appeared at the end of
the Botai era. For their comments on differential bone weathering in Atbasar sites, see Akhin-
zhalov, Makarova, and Nurumov 1992:28-29, 39.

32. Logvin (1992) and Gaiduchenko (1995) interpreted some animal bones in sites of the
Eneolithic Tersek culture, centered in the Tugai steppes near Kustenai, Kazakhstan, and dated
to the same period as Botai, as domesticated cattle, particularly from Kumkeshu I. Another zo-
ologist, Makarova, had identified the Tersek bovid bones as those of wild bison (Akhinzhalov,
Makarova, and Nurumov 1992:38). Some domesticated cattle might have been kept in Tersek
sites, which were closer to the Pontic-Caspian herders. None appeared at Botai. For Kumkeshu
I, see Logvin, Kalieva, and Gaiduchenko 1989.

488 Notes to Chapter //

33. For horses in the Caucasus I relied on the text of a conference paper by Mezhlumian
(1990). A few horses might have passed through the Caucasus into northern Iran before 3000
BCE, indicated by a few probable horse teeth at the site of Qabrestan, west of Teheran (see
Mashkour 2003) and a possible horse tooth at Godin Tepe (see Gilbert 1991). No definite horse
remains have been identified in eastern Iran, Central Asia, or the Indian subcontinent in depos-
its dated earlier than 2000 BCE, claims to the contrary notwithstanding. For a review of this
debate, see Meadow and Patel 1997.

34. For central European horses, see See Benecke 1994; Bokonyi 1979; and Peske 1986.

35. Khazanov 1994:32.

36. For war and the prestige trade, see Vehik 2002.

37. The American Indian analogy is described in Anthony 1986. The most detailed analysis
of the effects of horseback riding and horse keeping on Plains Indian cultures is Ewers 1955.

38. One argument against riding before 1500 BCE was that steppe horses were too small to
ride. This is not true. More than 70% of the horses at Dereivka and Botai stood 136-144 cm at
the withers, or about 13-14 hands high, and some were 15 hands high. They were the same size
as Roman cavalry horses. Another argument is that rope and leather bits were inadequate for
controlling horses in battle. This is also not true, as the American Indians demonstrated. Our
SUN Y students at Cobleskill also had M no problem” controlling horses with rope bits. The third
is that riders in the steppes rode sitting back on the rump of the horse, a manner suited only to
riding donkeys, which did not exist in the steppes. We have rebutted these doubts about Eneo-
lithic riding in Anthony, Brown, and George 2006. For the arguments against Eneolithic rid-
ing, see Sherratt 1997a:217; Drews 2004:42-50; Renfrew 2002; and E. Kuzmina 2003:213.

39. The remains of a bow found in Berezovka kurgan 3, grave 2, on the Volga, in a grave of
Pokrovka type probably dated about 1900—1750 BCE, had bone plates reinforcing the shaft and
bone tips at the ends — a composite bow. The surviving pieces suggest a length of 1.4-1. 5 m,
almost five feet from tip to tip. See Shishlina 1990; and Malov 2002. For an overview of early
archery and bows, see Zutterman 2003.

40. I am indebted to Dr. Muscarella for some of these ideas about arrow points. For a dis-
cussion of the initial appearance and usage of socketed bronze arrowheads, see Derin and Mus-
carella 2001. For a catalogue and discussion of the early Iron Age socketed arrowheads of the
Aral Sea region, see Itina and Yablonskii 1997. Socketed bronze spear points were made in the
steppes as early as 2000 BCE, and smaller socketed points began to appear occasionally in
steppe sites about the middle of the Late Bronze Age, around 1500 BCE, but their potential
was not immediately exploited. The ideal bows, arrows, and arrowheads for mounted archery
evolved slowly.

41. For tribal warfare, see Keeley 1996.

Chapter 11. The End of Old Europe and the Rise of the Steppe

1. For the gold at Varna, see Bailey 2000:203-224; Lafontaine and Jordanov 1988; and
Eleure 1989.

2. Chapman 1989.

3. For off-tell settlement at Bereket, see Kalchev 1996; at Podgoritsa, see Bailey et al.
1998.

4. The decrease in solar insolation that bottomed out at 4000-3800 BCE is documented in
Perry and Hsu 2000; and Bond ct al. 2001. For the Piora Oscillation in the Swiss Alps, see Zoller
1977. For indicators of cooling in about 4000 BCE in the Greenland ice cores, see O’Brien et al.
1995. For climate change in Central Europe in the German oak tree rings, see Leuschner et al.
2002. For the Pontic steppes, see Kremenetski, Chichagova, and Shishlina 1999.

5. For the flooding and agricultural shifts, see Bailey et al. 2002. For overgrazing and soil
erosion, see Dennell and Webley 1975.

Notes to Chapter // 489

6. For Jilava, see Comsa 1976.

7. The pollen changes are described in Marinova 2003.

8. Cast copper objects began to appear regularly in western Hungary with the Lasinja-
Balaton culture at about 4000 BCE; see Banffy 1995; also Parzinger 1992.

9. Todorova 1995:90; Chernykh 1992:52. The burning of houses might have been an inten-
tional ritual act during the Eneolithic; see Stevanovic 1997. But the final fires that consumed
the Eneolithic towns of the lower Danube valley and the Balkans about 4000 BCE were fol-
lowed by region-wide abandonment and abrupt culture change. Region-wide abandonments of
large settlements in the North American Southwest (1100-1400 CE) and in Late Classic Maya
sites (700-900 CE) in Mesoamerica were associated with intense warfare; see Cameron and
Tomka 1993. The kind of climate shift that struck the lower Danube valley about 4100-3800
BCE would not have made tell settlements uninhabitable. Warfare therefore seems a likely
explanation.

10. For evidence of overgrazing and soil erosion at the end of the Karanovo VI period, see
Dennell and Webley 1975; for the destruction of Eneolithic Yunatsite, see Merpert 1995; and
Nikolova 2000.

11. Todorova 1995.

12. See Ellis 1984 for ceramic workshops, and Popov 1979 for flint workshops. I use the
Russian spelling (Tripolye, Tomashovka) rather than the Ukrainian (Tripilye, Tomashivka),
because many site names such as Tripolye are established in the literature outside Ukraine in
their Russian spelling.

13. On the demographics, see Dergachev 2003; and Masson 1979. On the flight of Bolgrad-
Aldeni refugees, see Sorokin 1989.

14. On Tripolye B1 warfare generally, see Dergachev 2003, 1998b; and Chapman 1999. On
Drutsy 1, see Ryndina and Engovatova 1990. For much of the other information in this section
I have relied on the review article by Chernysh 1982.

15. The Cucuteni C designation refers only to a type of shell-tempered pottery. The Cucu-
teni chronology ends with Cucuteni B r Cucuteni C ware appeared first in sites dated to the
Cucuteni A/Tripolye B1 period and ultimately dominated ceramic assemblages. See Ellis
1984:40-48.

16. The source of the steppe influence on Cucuteni C pottery is usually identified as the early
Sredni Stog culture, phase lb, for Telegin; or the Skelya culture, for Rassamakin.

17. Shell-temper adds to the durability and impact resistance of vessels that are regularly
submitted to thermal shock through reheating, and also increases the cooling effect of evapora-
tion, making a shell-tempered pot good for cooking or storing cool drinking water. Cucuteni C
ware and fine painted wares were found together both in pit-houses and large two-storied sur-
face houses. Contextual differences in the distribution of Cucuteni C ware and fine ware in
settlements have not been described. At some sites the appearance of Cucuteni C wares seems
abrupt: Polivanov Yar had traditional grog-tempered coarse wares in the Tripolye B2 occupa-
tion but switched to shell- tempered C wares of different shapes and designs in Tripolye Cl,
whereas the fine painted wares showed clear continuity between the two phases. See Bronitsky
and Hamer 1986; Gimbutas 1977; and Marinescu-Bilcu 1981.

18. For the horse-head maces see Telegin et al. 2001; Dergachev 1999; Gheorgiu 1994; and
Govedarica and Kaiser 1996.

19. For the skull shapes, see Necrasov 1985; and Marcsik 1971. Gracile “Mediterranean”
Tripolye skulls have been found in ritual foundation deposits at Traian (Tripolye B2).

20. For Mirnoe, see Burdo and Stanko 1981.

21. For the eastern migration, see Kruts and Rizhkov 1985.

22. The Iron Age stereotype of nomadic cavalry seems to lie behind some of the writings of
Merpert (1974, 1980) and Gimbutas (1977), who were enormously influential.

23. The “awkward seat” hypothesis is based on Near Eastern images that show riders sitting
awkwardly on the horse’s rump, a seat more suited to donkey riding. Donkeys have low withers

490 Notes to Chapter n

and a high, broad rump. If you sit forward on a donkey and the animal lowers its head, you can
easily fall forward to the ground. Donkey riders, therefore, usually sit back on the rump. Horses
have high withers, so horse riders sit forward, which also permits them to hang onto the mane.
You have to push and lift to get yourself onto a horse’s rump, and then there’s nothing to hold on
to. Artistic images that show riders on horseback sitting back on the rump probably indicate
only that many Near Eastern artists before 1000 BCE, particularly in Egypt, were more famil-
iar with riding donkeys than horses. The suggestion that riders in the steppes would adopt and
maintain a donkey seat on horses is inherently implausible. See Drews 2004:40-55, for this
argument.

24. For mutualism and economic exchanges between Old Europe and the Eneolithic cul-
tures of the Pontic steppe, see Rassamakin 1999:112; see also Manzura, Savva, and Bogotaya
1995; and Nikolova 2005:200. Nikolova has argued that transhumant pastoralism was already
part of the Old European economy in Bulgaria, but the Yagodinska cave sites she cited are ra-
diocarbon dated about 3900 BCE, during or just after the collapse. Upland pastoral settlements
were a small and comparatively insignificant aspect of the tell economies, and only a serious
crisis made them the basis for a new economy.

25. Ewers 1955:10.

26. Sec Bcnvcnistc 1973:53-70, for Give and Take, esp. 66-67 for the Hittite terms; for the
quotation, see 53. Hittite pai was derived from the preverb pe- with *<*/-, with reflexes meaning
“give" in Tocharian ai-. Also see the entry for Give in Mallory and Adams 1997:224-225.

27. Sec Keeley 1996. For mutualist models of the Linear Pottery frontier, see Bogucki 1988.
An ethnographic case frequently cited in discussions of mutualist food exchange is that ot the
horticultural Pueblo Indians and the pedestrian buffalo hunters of the Plains. But a recent study
by Susan Vchik suggested that the Pueblo Indians and the Plains bison hunters traded prestige
commodities — flint arrowheads, painted pottery, and turquoise — not food. And during a pe-
riod of increasing conflict in the Plains after 1250 CE, trade actually greatly increased; see
Vchik 2002.

28. See Kershaw 2000.

29. See “bride-price” in Mallory and Adams 1997:82-83.

30. In East Africa a group of foragers and beekeepers, the Mukogodo, were forced to obtain
livestock after they began to interact and intermarry with stock-raising tribes, because it be-
came impossible for Mukogodo men to obtain wives by offering beehives when non-Mukogodo
suitors offered cattle. Cattle were just more valuable. The Mukogodo became pastoralists so that
they could continue to have children. See Cronk 1989, 1993.

31. Ewers 1955:185-187.

32. The Sredni Stog site had two levels, Sredni Stog 1 and 2. The lower level (Sredni Stog 1)
was an Early Eneolithic DDII occupation, and the upper was the type site for the Late Eneo-
lithic Sredni Stog culture. In older publications the Sredni Stog culture is sometimes called
Sredni Stog 2 (or II) to differentiate it from Sredni Stog 1 (or I).

33. The Sredni Stog culture is defined in Telcgin 1973. The principal settlement site of the
Sredni Stog cultre, Dereivka, is described in English in Telegin 1986; for the Sredni Stog origin
of Cucutcni C ware, see 111-112. Telegin’s chronological outline is described in English in
Telegin 1987.

34. The longest and most detailed version of Rassamakin’s new model in English is the 123-
page article, Rassamakin 1999. Telcgin’s four phases (la, lb, Ila, lib) of the Sredni Stog culture
represented, for Rassamakin, at least three separate and successive cultures: (1) the Skelya cul-
ture, 4500-4000 BCE (named for Strilcha Skelya, a phase lb Sredni Stog site for Telegin); (2)
the Kvityana culture, 3600-3200 BCE (Kvityana was a phase la site for Telegin, but Rassama-
kin moved it to the equivalent of Telegin’s latest phase 1 1 b) ; and (3) the Dereivka culture,
3200-3000 BCE (a phase Ila site for Telegin, dated 4200-3700 BCE by radiocarbon). Telegin
seemed to stick to the stratigraphy, grave associations, and radiocarbon dates, whereas Rassa-
makin relied on stylistic arguments.

Notes to Chapter ii 491

35. For Sredni Stog ceramics, see Telegin 1986:45-63; 1973:81-101. For skeletal studies,
sec Potekhina 1999:149-158.

36. For the seeds at Moliukhor Bugor, see Pashkevich 1992:185. For the tools at Dereivka,
see Telegin 1973:69, 43. Bibikova actually reported 2,412 horse bones and 52 horse MNI. I have
edited out the mandible, skull, and two mctacarpals of the “cult stallion.”

37. Only four settlement animal bone samples are reported for Sredni Stog. Most of them
are worryingly small (a few hundred bones) and screens were not used in excavations (still are
not), so bone recovery varied between excavations. For these reasons, the published animal bone
percentages can be taken only as rough guides. For an English translation of the faunal reports,
sec Telegin 1986.

38. Rassamakin (1999:128) assigned the Dereivka cemetery, which he called Dereivka 2, to
the Skelya period, before 4000 BCE, and assigned the Dereivka settlement to the Late Eneo-
lithic, around 3300-3000 BCE. Telegin, following the radiocarbon dates from the settlement
and the Tripolye B2 bowl found in the cemetery, assigned both to the same period.

39. See Dietz 1992 for the varied interpretations of antler “chcekpieces.”

40. For the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka group, see Nechitailo 1996; and Telegin et al. 2001.
The metals arc analyzed in Ryndina 1998:159-170; for an English summary, see 194-195.
English-language discussions of the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka group arc few. In addition to
Rassamakin’s description of the Skelya culture, which incorporates Suvorovo-Novodanilovka,
sec Dcrgachev 1999; and Manzura, Savva, and Bogotaya 1995. And there is a useful entry un-
der “Suvorovo” in Mallory and Adams 1997.

41. Telcgin 2002, 2001.

42. The physical type in Novodanilovka graves is discussed in Potekhina 1999:149-154. The
types of the lower Danube valley are described by Potekhina in Telcgin et al. 2001; and in
Nccrasov and Cristescu 1973.

43. Ryndina (1998:159-170) examined copper objects from graves at Giugiurlefti, Suvo-
rovo, Novodanilovka, Petro-Svistunovo, and Chapli. For the copper of Varna and Gumelnitsa,
see Pcrnicka et al. 1997. They document the end of the Balkan mines and the switch to Car-
pathian ores at about 4000 BCE.

44. The horse-head examples in the Volga steppes were found at Novoorsk near Orenburg
and at Lebyazhinka near Samara. For the polished stone mace heads, see Kriukova 2003.

45. For Old European weapons, see Chapman 1999.

46. Equus hydruntinus had a special ritual status in the cemeteries of Varna and Durankulak,
but was unimportant in the diet and was on the brink of extinction. Horses (Equus caballus)
were rare or absent in the Eneolithic settlements and cemeteries of the Danube valley before the
Cernavoda I period, except for sites of the Bolgrad variant. The Gumclnija-related Bolgrad sites
had about 8% horse bones. Other Old European sites in the Danube valley had few or no horses.
For the Varna and Durankulak equids, see Manhart 1998.

47. See Vehik 2002 on increased warfare and long-distance trade in the Southwest. DiCosmo
(1999) observed that increased warfare in the steppes encouraged organizational changes in
preexisting institutions, and these changes later made large nomadic armies possible.

48. Contacts between late Tripolye A/early B1 settlements and the Bolgrad culture are
summarized in Burdo 2003. Most of the contact is dated to late Tripolye A — Tripolye AIII2
and 1113.

49. For Bolgrad sites, see Subbotin 1978, 1990.

50. For the intrusive cemeteries, see Dodd-Oprifescu 1978. For the gold and copper hoards,
see Makkay 1976.

51. For the Suvorovo kurgan group, see Alekseeva 1976. The Kopchak kurgan is described
in Bcilckchi 1985.

52. Giurgiulejti is described briefly in Haheu and Kurciatov 1993. One radiocarbon date
is published from Giurgiule§ti: Ki-7037, 5380 ±70 BP, or about 4340-4040 BCE, calibrated;
1 have been told that the date is misprinted in Telegin et al. 2001, 128.

49 2 Notes to Chapter 12

53. The Novodanilovka grave, which was isolated and not in a cemetery, is described in
Telcgin 1973:113; for Petro-Svistunovo and Chapli, see Bodyans’kii 1968; and Dobrovol’ski
1958.

54. The region-wide abandonment of tells in about 4000-3500 BCE is observed in Cole-
man 2000. 1 do not sec how this could have been the event that brought Greek speakers into
Greece, because Greek shared many traits with the Indo-Iranian language branch (sec the end
of chapter 3), and lndo-Iranian emerged much later. The crisis of 4000 BCE probably brought
Pre-Anatolian speakers into southeastern Europe.

55. See Madgearu 2001 on de- urbanization in post-Roman Bulgaria. Mace (1993) notes
that if grain production falls, cattle are insurance against starvation. Cattle can be moved into
a protected area during a period of conflict. Under conditions of declining agricultural yields
and increasing conflict, a shift to a greater reliance on herding would make good economic
sense.

56. For loot, lucre, and booty in Proto-Indo-European, see Benveniste 1973:131-137; for
language shift among the Pathan, see Barth 1972.

57. For Cernavoda I, see Morintz and Roman 1968; and Roman 1978; see also Georgieva
1990; Todorova 1995; and Il£eva 1993. A good recent summary is in Manzura 1999. For the
cemetery of Ostrovul Corbului, see Nikolova 2002, 2000.

58. Sherratt 1997b, 1997c. Sherratt suggested that the drinking vessels of the period from
4000 to 2500 BCE were used to serve a beverage that included honey (the basis of mead) and
grain (the source of beer), both directly attested in Early Bronze Age Bell Beaker cups. Honey,
he suggested, would have been available only in small quantities, and might have been under the
control of an elite who apportioned the fermented drink in ceremonies and closed gatherings
open to just their inner circle. Proto-Indo-European contained a word for honey (' 'melit -) and a
derivative term tor a honey drink i^medbu -).

59. For Cernavoda I-Late Lengyel horses, see Peske 1986; and Bokonyi 1979.

60. For pastoralism, see Greenfield 1999; Bokonyi 1979; and Milisauskas 2002:202.

61. For the prayer to Sius, see Puhvel 1991.

Chapter 12 . Seeds of Change on the Steppe Borders

1. Ryndina (1998:170-171) counted 79 copper objects from steppe graves for the Post-
Suvorovo period, compared to 362 for Suvorovo-Novodanilovka graves.

2. See Tclegin 2002, 1988, 1987; see also Nikolova and Rassamakin 1985; and Rassamakin
1999. Early reports on Mikhailovka are Lagodovskaya, Shaposhnikova, and Makarevich 1959;
Shaposhnikova 1961 (this was the article where the division between lower and upper stratum 2
was noticed); and Shevchenko 1957. For the stratigraphic position of Lower Mikhailovka graves,
see Cherniakov and Toshchev 1985. Radiocarbon dates for graves with Mikhailovka I pottery
are reported in Videiko and Petrenko 2003. Early Mikhailovka II begins about 3500 BCE, in
Kotova and Spitsyna 2003.

3. For the Maikop sherd at Mikhailovka I, see Nechitailo 1991:22. For the other pottery
exchanges, see Rassamakin 1999:92; and Telegin 2002:36.

4. Pashkcvich 2003.

5. The sheep of the Early Bronze Age in southeastern Europe were significantly larger than
Encolithic sheep, which Bokonyi (1987) attributed to a new breed of wool sheep that appeared
after about 3500 BCE.

6. At the Cernavoda site three excavation areas yielded three successive archaeological
cultures, of which the oldest was Cernavoda I, about 4000-3600 BCE; next was Cernavoda III,
about 3600-3000 BCE, contemporary with Baden; and the youngest was Cernavoda II, 3000-
2800 BCE. Mikhailovka I probably was contemporary with the end of Cernavoda I and the
first half of Cernavoda III. See Manzura, Savva, and Bogatoya 1995.

Notes to Chapter 12 493

7. For Mikhailovka I graves at Olaneshti, see Kovapenko and Fomenko 1986; and for
Sokolovka, see Sharafutdinova 1980.

8. Potekhina 1999:150-151.

9. “Post-Mariupol" was the label first assigned by Kovaleva in the 1970s. See Nikolova and
Rassamakin 1985; Telegin 1987; and Kovaleva 2001.

10. See Ryndina 1998:170-179, for Post-Mariupol metal types.

11. The two graves were Verkhnaya Maevka XII k. 2, gr. 10; and Samarska k.l, gr. 6 in the
Orel-Samara region. See Ryndina 1998:172-173.

12. For Razdorske, see Kiyashko 1987, 1994.

13. The percentage of horse bones at Repin is often said to be 80%. Shilov (1985b) reviewed
the numbers and came up with 55% horse bones, still a very high number.

14. For Repin/Yamnaya at Cherkasskaya, see Vasiliev and Siniuk 1984:124-125.

15. For Kara Khuduk and Kyzyl-Khak, see Barynkin and Vasiliev 1988; for the fauna, see I.
Kuzmina 1988. Also see Ivanov and Vasiliev 1995; and Barynkin, Vasiliev, and Vybornov 1998. For
the radiocarbon dates for Kyzyl Khak, see Lavrushin, Spiridonova, and Sulerzhitskii 1998:58-59.
For late Khvalynsk graves on the lower Volga, see Dremov and Yudin 1992; and Klepikov 1994.

16. Kruts typed the Chapaevka ceramics as late Tripolye Cl, whereas Videiko described
Chapaevka as a late Tripolye B2 settlement. See Kruts 1977; and Videiko 2003. Videiko argued
that ceramic craft traditions changed at different rates in different settlement groups. Tripolye
B2 stylistic habits lingered longer, he suggested, in the Dnieper group (Chapaevka) than they
did in the super-settlements of the South Bug group, which shifted to Tripolye Cl styles earlier.
Tripolye C2 styles began on the Dniester at Usatovo about 3400-3300 BCE, but Tripolye C2
styles appeared on the Dnieper about 3100 BCE.

17. Kruts 1977:48.

18. For the super-sites, see Videiko 1990, and other articles in the same volume; also see
Shmagli and Videiko 1987 and Kohl 2007.

19. At Maidanets’ke, emmer and spelt wheats were the most common cereals recovered;
barley and peas also were found in one house. Cattle (35% of domesticates, MNI) were the most
important source of meat, with pig (27%) and sheep (26%) as secondary sources; the remaining
11% was equally divided between dogs and horses. About 15% of the animals were red deer,
wild boar, bison, hare, and birds. The cattle, pigs, and abundant wild animals indicate substan-
tial forest near the settlement. A forest of about 20 <km 2 would have provided sufficient fire-
wood for the town, figuring about 2.2 ha of hardwood forest per family of five for a sustainable
woodiot. Since ecological degradation is not obvious, the abandonment of the town perhaps was
caused by warfare. See Shmagli and Videiko 1987:69, and several articles on economy in the
volume cited above as Videiko 1990.

20. The Tripolye Bl settlement of Polivanov Yar on the Dniester overlooked outcrops of
high-quality flint. One house was engaged heavily in flint working, with all stages of the tool-
making process. In the later Tripolye Cl settlement, all six excavated structures were engaged
in flint working, the initial shaping occurred elsewhere, and new products were made (heavy
flint axes and chisels about 10 cm long). The Tripolye Cl settlement had become a specialized
village of flint workers. Maidanets’ke imported finished flint tools of Dniester flint, probably
from Polivanov Yar. At Veseli Kut (150 ha), a Tripolye B2 town east of the South Bug valley,
two structures were identified as ceramic workshops. Eight buildings dedicated to ceramic
production were found at Varvarovka VIII (40 ha and 200 houses — the largest town in its re-
gion), and a similar ceramic factory appeared at Petreni on the Dniester, again the largest town
in its area. At Maidanets’ke, eight houses in a row contained looms (indicated by clusters of up
to seventy ceramic loom weights) and some had two looms, perhaps a specialized weaver’s quar-
ter. For Polivanov Yar, see Popova 1979; for ceramic workshops, see Ellis 1984.

21. For the Uruk expansion, see Algaze 1989; Stein 1999; and Rothman 2001. For copper
production at Hacincbi, see Ozbal, Adriaens, and Earl 2000; for the copper of Iran, see Mat-
thews and Fazeli 2004. For the wool sheep, see Bokonyi 1983; and Pollack 1999.

494 Notes to Chapter 12

22. For Sos and Berikldeebi, see Kiguradze and Sagona 2003; and Rothman 2003.

23. The Maikop-like pottery was found in prc-Kura-Araxes levels at Berikldeebi. Early
Maikop began before the Early Transcaucasian Culture. See Glonti and Dzhavakhishvili
1987.

24. For pre-Maikop Svobodnoe, see Nekhaev 1992; and Trifonov 1991. For steppe-
Svobodnoe exchanges, see Nekhaev 1992; and Rassamakin 2002.

25. The poses of those buried in the Maikop chieftain’s grave were not clear. For an English-
language description of the Maikop culture, see Chernykh 1992:67-83. Quite dated accounts
are Childe 1936; and Gimbutas 1956:56-6 2. A long, detailed description in Russian is in
Munchaev 1994. For the Novosvobodnaya graves, see Rezepkin 2000. For the archaeological
culture history in the North Caucasus, see Trifonov 1991.

26. For the silver and gold staff casings with bulls, see Chernopitskii 1987. The 47-cm
length of the riveted copper blade is emphasized in Munchaev 1994:199.

27. Rostovtseff (1922:18-32) argued that Maikop was a Copper Age or, in Anatolian terms,
a Late Chalcolithic culture. But IVTaikop became established as a North Caucasian Bronze Age
culture, so it begins somewhat earlier than the Anatolian Bronze Age to which it was originally
linked. Some Russian archaeologists now suggest an early Maikop phase that would be Late
Eneolithic, whereas later Maikop would remain Early Bronze Age. For Maikop chronology, see
Trifonov 1991, 2001. For my own mistaken chronology, see Glumac and Anthony 1992. I
should have believed Rostovtseff.

28. For the east Anatolian seal, see Nekhaev 1986; and Munchaev 1994:169, table 49:1-4.

29. For Galugai, see Korenevskii 1993, 1995; the fauna is described in 1995:82. Korenevskii
considered Galugai a pioneer settlement by migrants from Arslantepe VIA. For Maikop horses,
see Chernykh 1992:59.

30. Rezepkin (1991, 2000) argued that Maikop and Novosvobodnaya were separate and
contemporary cultures. Similar radiocarbon dates from Galugai (Maikop) and Klady (Novos-
vobodnaya) suggested this. But the radiocarbon dates for Galugai are on charcoal and those
from Klady are on human bone, which might be affected by old carbon in fish if the Klady
people ate a lot offish. Adjusted for a 15 N content of 11%, which would be at the low end of the
levels known in the steppes, the oldest Klady dates might drop from about 3700-3500 to about
3500—3350 BCE. I follow the traditional view and represent Novosvobodnaya as an outgrowth
of Maikop. Rezepkin compared Novosvobodnaya pottery to TRB or Funnel Beaker pottery
from Poland, and megalithic porthole graves at Klady to TRB dolmen porthole graves. He sug-
gested that Novosvobodnaya began with a migration from Poland. Sergei Korenevskii (1993)
tried to bring the two phases back into a single culture. Black burnished pottery is found in
central Anatolia at Late Chalcolithic and at EBI sites such as Kosk Hoyuk and Pinarbi ? i, a
closer alternative source.

31. Shishlina, Orfinskaya, and Golikov 2003.

32. See Kiguradze and Sagona 2003:89, for the beads at Alikemek Tepesi.

33. The Maikop-Novosvobodnaya connections of the Se Girdan kurgans were noticed by
A. D. Rezepkin and B. A. Trifonov; both published Russian-language articles describing these
connections in 2000. These were brought to Muscarella’s attention in 2002 by Elena Izbitser at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Muscarella (2003) reviewed this history.

34. For the symbolic power of long-distance trade, see Helms 1992. For primitive valuables,
see Dalton 1977; and Appadurai 1986.

35. For the Novosvobodnaya wagon grave, see Rezepkin and Kondrashov 1988:52.

36. Shilov and Bagautdinov 1998.

37. See Nechitailo 1991, for Maikop-steppe contacts. Rassamakin (2002) suggested that
Late Tripolye migrants of the Kasperovka type influenced the formation of the Novosvobod-
naya culture.

38. Cannabis might have been traded from the steppes to Mesopotamia. Greek kannabis
and Proto-Germanic *hanipiz seem related to Sumerian kunibu. Sumerian was dead as a widely

Notes to Chapter ij 495

spoken language by about 1700 BCE, so the connection must have been a very ancient one, and
the international trade of the Late Uruk period provides a suitable context; see Sherratt 2003,
1997c. Wine could have been a linked commodity; the Greek, Latin, Armenian, and Hittite
roots for “wine” are cognates, and some linguists feel that the root was of Semitic or Afro-
Asiatic origin. See Hock and Joseph 1996:513.

39. For Caucasian horses, see Munchaev 1982; Mezhlumian 1990; and Chernykh 1992:59.
For Nor^untepe and Anatolia, see Bokonyi 1991.

Chapter 13 . Wagon Dwellers of the Steppe

1. For climate change at the beginning of the Yamnaya period, see Kremenetski 1997b,

2002.

2. The *ghos-ti- root survived only in Italic, Germanic, and Slavic, but the institution was
more widespread. See Benveniste 1973:273—288 on Philos , and entries in Mallory and Adams
1997 on guest and friend. Ivanov suggested that Luwian kasi- ‘visit’ might possibly be cognate
with Proto-Indo-European *ghos-ti- > but the relationship was unclear. See Gamkrelidze and
Ivanov 1995:657-658, for their discussion of hospitality. In later Indo-European societies, this
institution was critical for the protection of merchants and visiting elites or nobles; see Kristian-
sen and Larsson 2005:236—240. See also Rowlands 1980.

3. As Mallory has noted, the eastern Indo-European branches did have some agricultural
vocabulary. The eastern Indo-Europeans talked about plowed fields, grain, and chaff. The ar-
chaeological contrast between east and west is more extreme than the linguistic one, which
perhaps reflects the difference between what people knew and could talk about (language) and
how they actually behaved most of the time (archaeology). See entries on agriculture , field , and
plow in Mallory and Adams 1997.

4. For the feminine gender as one of the ten innovations distinguishing classic Proto-Indo-
European from the archaic form preserved in Anatolian, see Lehrman 2001. For the Afro-
Asiatic loans in western Indo-European, see Hock and Joseph 1996:513. For Rudra’s female
consorts, see Kershaw 2000:212

5. Gimbutas 1956:70ff. I would never have thought it possible to penetrate the archaeology
of Eastern Europe had it not been for this pioneering English-language synthesis, which opened
the door. Nevertheless, I soon began to disagree with her; see Anthony 1986. 1 was very pleased
to spend a few days with her in 1991 at a the National Endowment for the Humanities confer-
ence in Austin, Texas, organized by Edgar Polome.

6. The hundred-year anniversary of Gorodtsov’s 1903 archaeological expedition on the
Northern Donets River was celebrated by three conferences on the Bronze Age (or at least three
were planned). The first conference was in Samara in 2001, and the proceedings make a valuable
primer on the Bronze Age cultures of the steppes. See Kolev et al. 2001.

7. See Merpert 1974:123-146, for the Yamnaya “cultural-historical community.”

8. This steppe-pine-forest vegetation community is designated number 19 in the Atlas
SSSR, 1962, edited by S. N. Teplova, 88-89. It occurs both in the lowland and mountain steppe
environments.

9. Afanasievo radiocarbon dates are listed in table 13.3. Most of the Afanasievo dates appear
to be on wood from the graves, but some are on human bone. Although I have not seen l5 N mea-
surements for Afanasievo individuals, later skeletons from graves in the Altai had ,5 N levels of 10.2
to 14.3%. Applying the correction scale I am using in this book, the Afanasievo dates taken on
bone might be too old by 130 to 375 radiocarbon years. I have not corrected them, because, as I
said, most appear to have been measured on samples ot wood taken from graves, not human bone.

10. V. N. Logvin (1995) noted that some undated flat-grave cemeteries in northern Kazakh-
stan might represent a short-lived mixture of early Yamnaya or Repin and Botai-Tersek people.
For the Karagash kurgan, see Evdokimov and Loman 1989.

496 Notes to Chapter ij

Notes to Chapter ij 497

11. The pottery in the earliest Yamnaya graves in the Volga-Ural region (Pokrovka cemetery
I, k. 15, gr. 2; Lopatino k. 1, gr. 31; Gerasimovka II, k. 4, gr. 2) was Rcpin-influcnced; and the
pottery in the earliest Afanasievo kurgans (Bertek 33, Karakol) in the Gorny-Altai region also
looks Repin-influenced.

12. For Afanasievo, see Molodin 1997; and Kubarev 1988. On the craniometries, see Hemp-
hill and Mallory 2003; and Hemphill, Christensen, and Mustafakulov 1997. For the faunal
remains from Balyktyul, see Alekhin and Galchenko 1995.

13. On the local cultures, see Weber, Link, and Katzenberg 2002; also Bobrov 1988.

14. Chernykh 1992:88; Chernykh, Kuz’minykh, and Orlovskaya 2004.

15. For Tocharian linkages to Afanasievo, see Mallory and Mair 2000.

16. See Gei 2000:176, for the count of all steppe vehicle graves, and for the wagons of the
Novotitorovskaya culture. For the Yamnaya wagon grave at Balki kurgan, sec Lyashko and
Otroshchenko 1988. For the Yamnaya vehicle at Lukvanovka, see Melnik and Serdyukova 1988.
For the Yamnaya vehicle graves north of the Danube delta, sec Gudkova and Chernyakov 1981.
The Yamnaya vehicle graves at Shumaevo cemetery II, kurgans 2 and 6, were the first wagon
graves found in the Volga-Ural region in decades, excavated by M. A. Turetskii and N. L. Mor-
gunova in 2001-2002. One wheel was recognized in kurgans 6 and three in kurgan 2; see
Morgunova and Turetskii 2003. For early wheeled vehicles in general, see Bakker, ct al. 1999.

17. Melnik and Serdiukova (1988:123) suggested that Yamnaya wagons had no practical use
but were purely ritual imitations of vehicles used in the cults of Near Eastern kings. This as-
cribes to the Yamnaya people more veneration of distant Near Eastern symbols and less practi-
cal sense than seems likely to me. It also leaves unexplained the Yamnaya shift to an economy
based on mobility. Even if some of the wagons placed in graves •were lightly built funeral objects,
that does not mean that sturdier originals did not exist.

18. Izbitscr (1993) asserted that all these steppe vehicles, including those in graves where
only two wheels were found, were four-wheeled wagons. Her opinion has been cited in argu-
ments over the origin of the chariot to suggest that the steppe cultures perhaps had no experience
making two-wheeled vehicles; sec Littauer and Crouwcl 1996:936. But many graves contain just
two wheels, including Bal'ki kurgan, grave 57. The image on the Novosvobodnaya cauldron at
Evdik looks like a cart. Ceramic cart models associated with the Catacomb culture (2800-2200
BCE) and in the North Caucasus at the Badaani site of the ETC or Kura-Araxcs culture (3500-
2500 BCE) are interpreted by Izbitser as portraying something other than vehicles. Gei, on the
other hand, sees evidence for both carts and wagons, as do I. Sec Gei 2000:186.

19. The Dnieper region of Merpret 1974 was divided into no fewer than six microregions by
Syvolap 2001.

20. Telegin, Pustalov, and Kovalyukh 2003.

21. See Sinitsyn 1959; Merpert 1974; and Mallory 1977. For reconsiderations of Mcrpcrt’s
scheme in the light of the discovery of the Khvalynsk culture, see Dremov and Yudin 1992; and
Klepikov 1994. For a review of all the early Yamnaya variants in the Volga-Don-Caucasus
region, and their chronology, see Vasiliev, Kuznetsov, and Turetskii 2000.

22. Whereas Mikhailovka I produced 1,166 animal bones, Mikhailovka II and III together
yielded 52,540 bones.

23. For Yamnaya seed imprints, see Pashkcvich 2003. Pashkevich identifies Mikhailovka II
as a settlement of the Repin culture, reflecting the debate about its ceramic affiliation referred to
in the text; see also Kotova and Spitsyna 2003.

24. For Yamnaya and Catacomb chronology, see Trifonov 2001; Gei 2000; and Telegin,
Pustalov, and Kovalyukh 2003. For western Yamnaya and Catacomb dates, see Kosko and
Klochko 2003.

25. These views were well stated by Khazanov (1994) and Barfield (1989).

26. For grain cultivation by steppe nomads, see Vainshtein 1980; and DiCosmo 1994. For
modern nomads who ate very little grain, see Shakhanova 1989. For the growth of bodyguards
into armies, see DiCosmo 1999, 2002.

27. See Shilov 1985b.

28. For a study of seasonal indicators in kurgans in the Kalmyk steppes, see Shishlina 2000.
For comments on the Yamnaya herding pattern in the Dnieper steppes, see Bunyatyan 2003.

29. For Samsonova, sec Gei 1979. For Liventsovka, see Bratchenko 1969. The predominance
of cattle at these places is mentioned in Shilov 1985b:30.

30. Surface scatters of Yamnaya lithics and ceramics in the Manych Depression in Kalmykia
are mentioned by Shishlina and Bulatov 2000; and in the lower Volga and North Caspian
steppes by Sinitsyn 1959:184. Desert or semi-desert conditions in these places make surface
sites more visible than they are in the northern steppes, where the sod hides the ground. In the
Samara oblast wc found LBA occupations 20-30 cm beneath the modern ground surface; sec
Anthony et al. 2006. The winter camps of the Blackfeet are described in Ewers 1955:124-126:
“Green Grass Bull said that bands whose members owned large horse herds had to move camp
several times each winter. . . . However, a short journey of less than a days march might bring
them to a new site possessing adequate resources for another winter camp . . . Demands on fuel
and grass were too great to allow all the members of a tribe to winter in one large village.” This
kind of behavior might make Yamnaya camps hard to find.

31. The Tsa-Tsa grave is described in Shilov 1985a.

32. Yamnaya dental pathologies in the middle Volga region with comparative data from
Hsiung-Nu and other cemeteries were studied by Eileen Murphy at Queens University Belfast
as part of the Samara Valley Project. The unpublished internal report is in Murphy and
Khokhlov 2004; see also Anthony et al. 2006. For caries in different populations, see Lukacs
1989.

33. For phytoliths in Yamnaya graves, see Shishlina 2000. The yields of Chenopodium and
einkorn wheat were compared by Smith 1989. Amaranthus has 22% more protein (g/kg) than
bread wheat, and Chenopodium has 34% more; wheat is higher in carbohydrates than either. For
nutrient comparisons, see Gremillion 2004.

34. For the high incidence of curbitra orbitalis among Yamnaya skeletons, sec Murphy and
Khokhlov 2004; and Anthony et al. 2006.

35. For lactose tolerance, see Enattah 2005.

36. See Vainshtein 1980:59, 72, for comments on cows, milk foods, and poverty.

37. Mallory 1990.

38. On genders in Yamnaya graves, sec Murphy and Khokhlov 2004; Gei 1990; Hausler
1974; and Mallory 1990.

39. On “Amazon” graves, see Davis-Kimball 1997; and Guliaev 2003.

40. Alexander Gei (1990) estimated a population density of 8-12 people per 100 km 2 in the
EBA Novotitorovskaya and 12-14 per 100 km 2 in the MBA Catacomb periods in the Kuban
steppes. But kurgans were erected only for a small percentage of those who died, so Gei's figures
undcrcount the actual population density by an order of magnitude. At ten times his grave-
based estimate, or about 120 people per 100 km 2 , the population density would have been like
that of modern Mongolia, where pastoralism is the dominant element in the economy.

41. Golyeva2000. .

42. For the equation between the status and man-days invested in the funeral, see Binford
1971. See also Dovchenko and Rychkov 1988; Mallory’s analysis of their study in Mallory
1990; and Morgunova 1995.

43. The granulated decoration on the two golden rings from Utyevka I, kurgan 1, grave 1, is
surprising, since the technique of making and applying golden granulation requires very spe-
cific skills that first appeared about 2500 BCE (Troy II, Early Dynastic III). The middle Volga
was apparently connected with the Troad through some kind of network at this time. The axe in
the Utyevka grave is an early type, similar to the axes of Novosvobodnaya and Yamnaya, and
that implies a very early Poltavka date. The grave form and artifact assemblage taken together
suggested to Vasiliev a date at the late Yamnaya-early Poltavka transition, so probably about
2800 BCE. The grave has not been dated by radiocarbon. For Utyevka I and its analogies, see

49$ Notes to Chapter 14

Vasili ev 1980. For the Kutuluk grave with the mace, sec Kuznetsov 1991, 2005. For an over-
view, see Chernykh 1992:83-92.

44. Chernykh 1992:83-92.

45. For the Yamnaya grave at Pershin, see Chernykh; and Isto 2002. For the “clean” copper
on the Volga, see Korenevskii 1980.

46. For the Post-Mariupol graves, see Ryndina 1998:170-179; for Lebedi, see Chernykh
1992:79—83; and for Voroshilovgrad, see Berezanskaya 1979.

47. For the iron blade, see Shramko and Mashkarov 1993.

48. Oared longboats are not actually portrayed in surviving art until Early Cycladic II, after
2900-2800 BCE, but the number of settled Cycladic Islands jumped from 10% to 90% for the
first time in Early Cycladic I, beginning about 3300 BCE. "This was possible only with a reliable
form of seagoing transport. Longboats capable of holding twenty to forty oarsmen probably
appeared earlier than ECII. See Broodbank 1989.

49. For Kcmi-Oba graves in the Odessa oblast, see Subbotin 1995. For stone stelae in the
North Pontic steppes generally, see Telegin and Mallory 1994.

Chapter 14 . The Western Indo-European Languages

1. For a good essay on the subject of language shift, see the introduction in Kulick 1992.
For Scots Gaelic, see Dorian 1981; see also Gal 1978.

2. For the Galgenberg site of the Cham culture, see Ottaway 1999. Bokonvi saw the statis-
tical source of the larger horses that appeared in Central Europe in the horse population at
Dereivka; Benecke suggested that the horses of Late Mesolithic Mirnoc in the steppes north of
the Danube delta were a closer match. But both agreed that the source of the new larger breeds
was in the steppes. Sec Benecke 1994:73-74; and Bokonyi 1974.

3. hor the Bukhara horse trade, see Levi 2002. 1 am indebted to Peter Golden and Ranabir
Chakravarti for calling my attention to it.

4. Polome 1991. For the translation of the Rig Veda passage, see O’Flaherty 1981:92.

5. Sec Kristiansen and Larsson 2005:238.

6. Sec Benveniste 1973:61-63 for feasts; also see the entry for GIVE in Mallory and Ad-
ams 1997:224-225; and Markey 1990. For poets, see Watkins 1995:73-84. For the general
importance of feasting in tribal societies, see Dietler and Hayden 2001. For an ethnographic
parallel where chiefs and poets were mutually dependent, see Lehman 1989.

7. Mallory (1998) referred to this process using the wry metaphor of the Kulturkugel, a bul-
let of language and culture that acquired a new cultural skin after penetrating a target culture,
but retained its linguistic core.

8. A broad scatter of kurgan graves in the steppes contained imported Tripolye C2 pots
(among other imported pot types) and a few, like Serezlievka, also contained Tripolye-like sche-
matic rod-headed figurines. The Serezlievka-typc graves in the South Bug valley probably were
contemporary with \amnaya graves of the Zhivotilovka-Volchansk group in the Dnieper-Azov
steppes that also contained imported Tripolye C2 pots, dated by radiocarbon about 2900-2800
BCE. Rassamakin (1999, 2002) thought that Zhivotilovka-Volchansk graves represented a mi-
gration of Tripolye C2 people from the forested upper Dniester deep into the steppes east of the
Dnieper. But a Tripolye pot in a Yamnaya grave is most simply interpreted as a souvenir, gift, or
acquisition rather than as a migrant Tripolye person. Yamnaya graves rarely contained any pots.
Cotsofeni pots filled that customary void in the Yamnaya graves of the Danube valley, just as pot-
tery of the Tripolye C2, late Maikop, and Globular Amphorae types did in the Ukrainian steppes.

9. For the Usatovo culture see Zbenovich 1974; Dergachev 1980; Chernysh 1982; and
Patovka et al. 1989. For a history of excavations at Usatovo, see Patovka 1976. The Ccrnavoda
I affiliations of pre-Usatovo coastal steppe kurgans arc discussed in Manzura, Savva and Boga-

Notes to Chapter 14 499

toya 1995. A Ccrnavoda I feature in Usatovo is described in Boltenko 1957:42. Recent radiocar-
bon dates are discussed in Videlko 1999.

10. For Usatovo fauna see Zbenovich 1974: 111-115.

11. For spindle whorls, see Dergachev 1980:106.

12. See Kuz’minova 1990, for Usatovo paleobotany.

13. For Usatovo ceramics, see Zbenovich 1968, with a brief notice of the orange-slipped
grey wares on page 54.

14. For trade between Usatovo, late Cernavoda III, and late Maikop, see Zbenovich 1974:103,
141. The single glass bead at Usatovo was colored white bv the inclusion of phosphorus. It was in
a grave pit covered by a stone lid, a stone cairn, and then by the kurgan. The pear-shaped bead
measured 9 mm in diameter, had a hole 5 mm in diameter, and had slightly darker spiraling on
its surface. Two cylindrical glass beads, colored with copper (green-blue) were recovered from the
Tripolye C2 grave 125 at Sofievka on the Dnieper near Kiev, dated a century or two later, about
3000-2800 BCE (4320+70 BP, 4270+ 90 BP, 4300+45 BP, from three other graves at So-
fievka). Two other glass beads were found on the surface near this grave but certainly were not
from it. The glass in both Sofievka and Usatovo was made with ash as an alkali, not soda. An ash
recipe was used in the Near East. For analyses, see Ostroverkhov 1985. For the radiocarbon dates
from Sofievka and the amber beads from Zavalovka, see Videiko 1999.

15. For the daggers, see Anthony 1996. For oared longboats, see the end of the last chapter
of this volume, and Broodbank 1989.

16. For the ochre-painted skulls, see Zin’kovskii and Petrenko 1987.

17. For Zimnea, see Bronicki, Kadrow, and Zakoscielna 2003; see also Movsha 1985; and
Kosko 1999.

18. For fortifications, see Chernysh 1982:222.

19. See Boyadziev 1995, for the dating of the migration.

20. For the large cluster in Hungary, see Ecsedy 1979, 1994. For the cluster in Oltenia, see
Dumitrescu 1980. For the cluster in northern Serbia, sec Jovanovich 1975. For Bulgaria, see
Panayotov 1989. For overviews see, Nikoiova 2000, 1994. For relative chronologies at the time
of the migration event in southeastern Europe generally, see Parzinger 1993. For the wagon
grave at Plachidol, see Sherratt 1986. For the stone stelae, sec Telegin and Mallory 1994.
Ecsedy mentions that undecorated stone stelae were found near Yamnaya kurgans in Hungary.

21. The graves in Hungary could possibly have been the result of a separate migration
stream that passed directly over the Carpathians through Late Tripolye territory rather than
being a continuation of the lower Danube valley stream.

22. Most of the radiocarbon dates for Yamnaya graves in the Odessa oblast, the heart of the
Dniester steppes, are quite late, beginning about 2800-2600 BCE, by which time the Usatovo
culture was gone. There are a few earlier radiocarbon dates (Scmenovskii, k.ll, 14; Liman, k.2;
Novoseltsy, k.19), but in both of the Semenovskii kurgans the primary grave for which the kurgan
was raised was an Usatovo grave, and all the Yamnaya graves were secondary’. The stratigraphy'
makes me wonder about the early radiocarbon dates. Yamnaya seems to have taken over the Odessa
oblast steppes after the Usatovo culture. See Gudkova and Chernyakov 1981; and Subbotin 1985.

23. Kershaw 2000; see also entries on korios and warfare in Mallory and Adams 1997. The
cattle raid, a related institution, is discussed in Walcot 1979.

24. For Yamnaya dog-tooth ornaments on the Ingul, sec Bondar and Nechitailo 1980.

25. For the stelae of the steppes, see Telcgin and Mallory 1994. For the symbolic impor-
tance of belts, see Kershaw 2000:202-203; and Falk 1986:22-23.

26. Kalchev 1996.

27. Nikoiova 1996.

28. Alexandrov 1995.

29. Panayotov 1989:84-93.

30. Barth 1965:69.

500 Notes to Chapter /j

31. Bell Beaker decorated cup styles, domestic pot types, and grave and dagger types from
the middle Danube were adopted about 2600 BCE in Moravia and Southern Germany. This
material network could have been the bridge through which pre-Celtic dialects spread into
Germany. See Heyd, Husty, and Kreiner 2004, especially the final section by Volker Heyd.

32. See Hamp 1998; and Schmidt 1991, for connections between Italic and Celtic.

33. For the effects of wheeled vehicles, see Maran 2001.

34. See Szmyt 1999, esp. 178-188.

35. On the Slavic homeland, see Darden 2004.

36. Coleman (2000) argued that Greek speakers entered Greece during the Final Neo-
lithic/Bronze Age transition, about 3200 BCE. If an Indo-European language spread into
Greece this early I think it was more likely an Anatolian-type language. For a northern steppe
origin for Greek, but in a later era more amenable to my scenario, sec Lichardus and Vladar
1996; and Penncr 1998. The same evidence is marshaled for another purpose in Makkay 2000,
and in detail by Kristiansen and Larsson 2005. Another argument for a northern connection of
the Shaft Grave princes is presented in Davis 1983. Connections between southeastern Europe
and Greece are outlined in Hansel 1982. Robert Drews (1988) also argued that the Shaft Grave
princes were an immigrant dynasty from the north, although he derived them from Anatolia.

37. Mallory 1998:180.

Chapter 15 . Chariot Warriors of the Northern Steppes

1. Sec Gening, Zdanovich, and Gening 1992, for the original report on Sintashta.

2. The Sintashta culture remained unrecognized as recently as 1992. Chernykh (1992:210-
234) discussed Sintashta-type metals as part of the “Andronovo historico-cultural community,”
assigning it to about 1600-1500 BCE. Dorcas Brown and I visited Nikolai Vinogradov in 1992,
and I was permitted to take bone samples from the chariot grave at Krivoe Ozero for radiocar-
bon dating. This resulted in two articles: Anthony 1995a; and Anthony and Vinogradov 1995.
See Vinogradov 2003, for the complete report on the Krivoe Ozero cemetery. For the settle-
ment and cemeteries at Arkaim, see Zdanovich 1995; and Kovaleva and Zdanovich 2002. For
the Sintashta cemetery at Kammeny Ambar, see Epimakhov 2002. For a wide-ranging over-
view, see Grigoriev 2002, marred by the assumption that the Sintashta culture and many other
steppe cultures originated from a series of south-to-north folk migrations from Anatolia and
Syria, where he argued that the Indo-European homeland was located. See Lamberg-Karlovsky
2002, for connections to Central Asia. For conference proceedings, sec Jones-Bley and Zdanov-
ich 2002; Boyle, Renfrew, and Levine 2002; and Levine, Renfrew, and Boyle 2003.

3. I use the term Aryan here as it is defined it in chapter 1, as the self-designation of the
people who composed the hymns and poems of the Rig Veda and Avesta and their immediate
Indo-Iranian ancestors.

4. For the contact zone between Corded Ware, Globular Amphorae, and Yamnaya at
about 2800-2600 BCE, see Szmyt 1999, esp. pp. 178-188. Also see Machnik 1999; and
Klochko, Kosko, and Szmyt 2003. A classic review of the archaeological evidence for mixed
\amnaya, late Tripolye (Chapaevka), and Corded Ware elements in Middle Dnieper origins is
Bondar 1974. A recent review emphasizes the Yamnaya influence on the Middle Dnieper cul-
ture, in Tclcgin 2005.

5. For Middle Dnieper chronology, see Kryvaltsevich and Kovalyukh 1999; and Yaz-
epenka and Kosko 2003.

6. Machnik 1999.

7. Before the Middle Dnieper culture appeared, the east side of the river near Kiev had
been occupied between about 3000 and 2800 BCE by the mixed-origin late Tripolye C2
Sofievka group, which cremated its dead, used riveted daggers like those at Usatovo, and made

Notes to Chapter /j 507

pottery that showed both cord-impressed steppe elements and late Tripolye elements. For the
Sofievka settlement, see Kruts 1977:109-138; for radiocarbon dates, see Videiko 1999.

8. See Carpelan and Parpola 2001. This almost monograph-length article covers much of
the subject matter discussed in this chapter. For Corded Ware migrations from the genetic
point of view, see Kasperaviciute, Kucinskas, and Stoneking 2004.

9. For Balanovo, Abashevo, and Volosovo, see Bolshov 1995. For Abashevo ceramics, see
Kuzmina 1999. The classic work on Abashevo is Pryakhin 1976, updated in Pryakhin 1980. For
an English account, in addition to Carpelan Parpola and 2001, see Chernykh 1992:200-204
and Koryakova and Epimakhov 2007.

10. For the Volosovo culture, see Korolev 1999; Vybornov and Tretyakov 1991; and Bakharev
and Obchinnikova 1991.

11. For Abashevo and Indo-Iranian linkages, see Carpelan and Parpola 2001; and Pryakhin
1980.

12. For the headbands, see Bolshov 1995.

13. See Keeley 1996, on tribal war.

14. Sec Koivulehto 2001; and Carpelan and Parpola 2001.

15. Sec Ivanova 1995:175-176, for the Aleksandrovska IV kurgan cemetery.

16. For Kuisak settlement, see Maliutina and Zdanovich 1995.

17. In Table 1, sample AA 47803, dated ca. 2900-2600 BCE, was from a human skeleton of
the Poltavka period that was later cut through and decapitated by a much deeper Potapovka grave
pit. A horse sacrifice above the Potapovka grave is dated by sample AA 47802 to about 1900-
1800 BCE. Although they were almost a thousand years apart, they looked, on excavation, like
they were deposited together, with the Potapovka horse skull lying above the shoulders of the
decapitated Poltavka human. Before dates were obtained on both the horse and the skeleton this
deposit was interpreted as a “centaur” — a decapitated human with his head replaced by the head
of a horse, an important combination in Indo-Iranian mythology. But Nerissa Russell and Eileen
Murphy found that both the horse and the human were female, and the dates show that they
were buried a thousand years apart. Similarly sample AA-12569 was from an older Poltavka-
period dog sacrifice found on the ancient ground surface at the edge of Potapovka grave 6 under
kurgan 5 at the same cemetery. Older Poltavka sacrifices and graves were discovered under both
kurgans 3 and 5 at Potapovka cemetery I. The Poltavka funeral deposits were so disturbed by the
Potapovka grave diggers that they remained unrecognized until the radiocarbon dates made us
take a second look. The “centaur” possibility was mentioned in Anthony and Vinogradov 1995,
five or six years before the two pieces were dated. Of course, it now must be abandoned.

18. For Sarazm, see Isakov 1994.

19. For Kelteminar, see Dolukhanov 1986; and Kohl, Francfort, and Gardin 1984. The clas-
sic work on Kelteminar is Vinogradov 1981.

20. For a radiocarbon date from Sergeivka, sec Levine and Kislenko 2002, but note that
their discussion mistakenly assigns it to the Andronovo period, 1900-1700 BCE. See also
Kislenko and Tatarintseva 1990. Another transitional forager-herder group influenced bv Pol-
tavka was the Vishnevka 1 potter)' group in the forest-steppe on the northern Ishim; see Ta-
tarintseva 1984. For Sergeivka sherds at the Poltavka cemetery of Aleksandrovka, see Maliutina
and Zdanovich 1995:105.

21. For climate deterioration, see Blyakharchuk et al. 2004; and Krcmcnetski 2002, 1997a,
1997b.

22. Rosenberg 1998.

23. For the Mesopotamian metal trade, sec Muhly 1995; Potts 1999:168-171, 186.

24. For metals and mining, see Grigoriev 2002:84; and Zaikov, Zdanovich, and Yuminov
1995. Sec also Kovaleva and Zdanovich 2002. Grigoriev suggested that the amount of slag
found in each house was so small that it could represent household production. However, slag is
often found in small amounts even at industrial sites, and that all houses contained slag and

jo2 Notes to Chapter 15

production facilities (ovens with attached wells that aided in the updraft) shows an intensity of
metal production that was unprecedented in the steppes.

25. Sec DiCosmo 1999, 2002; and Vehik 2002.

26. Ust’e, like Chernorech’e III, was excavated by Nikolai Vinogrado. Vinogradov was kind
enough to show me his plans and photographs from Ust’e, where Sintashta houses are clearly
stratified beneath a Petrovka occupation.

27. See Epimakhov 2002:124-132 for the artifact catalogue.

28. For the ballistics of flint projectile points, see Knccht 1997; and Van Buren 1974. For
javelins in Greek chariot warfare, see Littaucr 1972; and Littauer and Crouwel 1983.

29. For the chariot petroglyphs, see Littauer 1977; Samashcv 1993; and Jacobsen-Tepfer
1993. On the derivation of steppe cheekpieces from Mycenaean checkpicces, sec E. Kuzmina
1980. For a review of European cheekpieces, sec Hiittel 1992. Littauer and Crouwel (1979) ar-
gued persuasively for the Near Eastern origin of the chariot, overthrowing pre-World War II
suggestions that the chariot was a super-weapon of the steppe Aryans. Piggott (1983, 1992)
began to challenge the Near Eastern origin hypothesis almost immediately. Moorey (1986) also
supported a multircgional invention of the various elements combined in the chariot.

30. See Epimakhov 2002:124-132 for a grave inventory that totals sixteen chariot graves;
see Kuzmina 2001:12 for an estimate of twenty. The sites Kuzmina lists include Sintashta (seven
chariot graves), Kamcnny Ambar (nvo), Solntse II (three), Krivoe Ozero (three), and, in north-
ern Kazakhstan, in Petrovka graves, Ulybai (one), Kenes (one), Berlvk II (two), and Satan
(one).

31. For arguments against the functionality of steppe chariots, see Littauer and Crouwel
1996; Joncs-Bley 2000; and Vinogradov 2003:264, 274. For arguments in favor of the steppe
chariots as effective instruments of war, see Anthony and Vinogradov 1995; and Nefedkin
2001.

32. For English descriptions of the narrow-gauge chariots, see Gening 1979; Anthony and
Vinogradov 1995; and Anthony 1995a. For two critical replies, see Littauer and Crouwel 1996;
and Jones-Blcy 2000. For the limitations of the chariot in battle, see Littauer 1972; and Littauer
and Crouwel 1983.

33. For Bronze Age steppe bows, see Grigoriev 2002:59-60; Shishlina 1990; Malov 2002;
and Bratchenko 2003:199. For ancient bows of the Near East and Iran, sec Zuttcrman 2003.

34. See Littaucr 1968.

35. For the disk cheekpieces, see Priakhin and Besedin 1999; Usachuk 2002; and Kuzmina
2003, 1980. For left and right side differences, see Priakhin and Besedin 1999:43-44. For chari-
ots in the Rig Veda , see Sparreboom 1985. For the metal examples in the Levant, see Littauer and
Crouwel 1986, 2001. This type of cheekpiece probably spread into Mycenaean Greece from
southeastern Europe, where it appeared in Otomani, Monteoru, and Vatin contexts. For radio-
carbon dates for these cultures, see Forenbaher 1993, and for disk-shaped cheekpieces in those
contexts, see Boroffka 1998, and Hiittel 1994. The European origin of Mycenaean chariotrv
might explain why Mycenaean chariot warriors, like the early charioteers of the northern steppes,
sometimes carried spears or javelins. For chariots in Greece, see Crouwel 1981.

36. For a review ot the Near Eastern evidence for chariots, see Oates 2003; for older studies,
see Moorey 1986, and Littauer and Crouwel 1979. For vehicles at Tell Brak, sec Oates 2001:141-
154. It we were to accept the “low” chronology, which seems increasingly likely, the date for the
end of Ur III and the earliest proto-chariots would shift down from 2000 to 1900 BCE. See
Rcadc 2001.

37. See Stillman and Tallis 1984:25 for Mitanni chariot squadrons; for Chinese chariot
squadrons, sec Sawyer 1993:5.

38. See Appuradai 1986:21 for the “tournament of values.”

39. For human pathologies, see Lindstrom 2002, who notes the complete absence of dental
caries, even in the oldest individuals (161). Lindstrom was the first Western archaeologist to
participate in excavations at a Sintashta site.

Notes to Chapter 16 50J

40. Igor Ivanov, a geomorphologist at Arkaim, told me in 2000 that the reports of irrigation
channels at Arkaim were mistaken, that these were natural features.

41. Sec Gening, Zdanovich, and Gening 1992:234-235 for Sacrificial Complex 1, and page
370 for the man-days for the SB kurgan.

42. For feasting in tribal societies, see Hayden 2001.

43. For the fauna, see Kosintsev 2001; and Gaiduchenko 1995. For N 15 isotopes in human
and animal bones, see Privat2002.

44. For doubts about social hierarchy in Sintashta society, see Epimakhov 2000:57-60.

45. Witzcl 1995:109, citing Kuiper 1991.

46. For various theories on how to link Sintashta and the Indo-Iranians, see Parpola 1988,
2004-2005; E. Kuzmina 1994, 2001; and Witzcl 2003.

47. All quotations are from O’Flaherty 1981.

48. For the Indo-European dog sacrifice and New Year initiation ceremony, see Kershaw
2000; and Kuiper 1991, 1960.

49. Epimakhov 2002; and Anthony et al. 2005.

Chapter 16 . The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes

1. For exotic knowledge and power, see Helms 1992.

2. For Indie terms among the Mitanni, sec chapter 3; Thicmc 1960; and Burrow 1973.

3. Elamite was a non-Indo-European language of uncertain affiliations. As Dan Potts
stressed, the people of the western Iranian highlands never used this or any other common term
as a blanket ethnic designation for themselves. They did not even all speak Elamite. See Potts
1999:2-4. For the appearance of horses, see Oates 2003.

4. See Weiss 2000; also Perry and Hsu 2000.

5. At Godin Tepe, onagers were 94% of the equid bones. A cheektooth and a metacarpal
from Godin IV, dated about 3000-2800 BCE, might be horse. The first dear and unambiguous
horse bones at Godin appeared in period III, dated 2100-1900 BCE; see Gilbert 1991. On
horses and mules at Malyan, see Zeder 1986. The bit wear at Malyan is the earliest unambigu-
ous bit wear in the Near East. Copper stains reported on the P 2 s of asses from Tell Brak, dated
2300-2000 BCE, might have had another cause (perhaps corroded lip rings). See Clutton-
Brock 2003.

6. Owen 1991.

7. The phrase Fahren und Reiten , or “To drive and to ride,” appeared between 1939 and
1968 in the titles of three influential publications by Joseph Weisner, and the order of terms in
this phrase — driving before riding — has become a form of shorthand referring to the historical
priority of the chariot over the ridden horse in the Bronze Age civilizations of the Near East.
Certainly wheeled vehicles preceded horseback riding in the Near East, and horse-drawn
chariots dominated Near Eastern warfare long before cavalry, but this was not because riding
was invented after chariotry (see chapter 10). If images of horseback riding can now be dated
before 1800 BCE, as seems to be the case, they preceded the appearance of horses with chariots
in Near Eastern art. See Weisner 1939, 1968; Drews 2004:33-41, 52; and Oates 2003.

8. For Zimri-Lim’s adviser’s advice, see Owen 1991; n. 12.

9. For tin sources, see Muhly 1995:1501-1519; Ycncr 1995; and Potts 1999:168-171, 186. For
Eneolithic Serbian tin-copper alloys, see Glumac and Todd 1991. For the possible mistranslation
of the Gudea inscription I am indebted to Chris Thornton, and, through him, to Greg Possehl and
Steven Tinncy. For the seaborne tin trade in the Arabian Gulf, see Weeks 1999; and for the Bac-
trian comb at Umm-al-Nar, see Potts 2000:126. For Harappan metals, see Agrawal 1984.

10. The polymetallic ores of the Zeravshan probably produced the metals of Ilgynly-Depe,
near Anau, during the fourth millennium BCE. At Ilgynly, among sixty-two copper artifacts,
primarly tanged knives, one object contained traces of tin; see Solovyova ct al. 1994. For tin

5 < 04 Notes to Chapter 16

bronzes in early third-millennium Namazga IV, see Salvatori et al. 2002. For Sarazm, see Isa-
kov 1994; for its radiocarbon dates and metals, see Isakov, et al. 1987.

11. For the tin mines of the Zeravshan, see Boroffka et al. 2002; and Parzinger and Boroffka
2003.

12. Zaman Baba graves have been seen as a hybrid between Kelteminar and Namazga V/
Vi-type cultures, see Vinogradov 1960:80-81; and as a hybrid with Catacomb cultures on the
supposition that Catacomb-culture people migrated to Central Asia, see Klejn 1984. I support
the former. For recent debates over Zaman Baba, see E. Kuzmina 2003:215-216.

13. Lyonnet (1996) sees Sarazm IV ending during Namazga IV, or during the middle of the
third millennium BCE. I see Sarazm ending in late Namazga V/early VI, based on the co-
occurrence of Pctrovka and late Sarazm pottery at Tugai, and on radiocarbon dates indicating
that Sarazm III was occupied in 2400-2000 BCE, so Sarazm IV had to be later.

14. For skull type affiliations, see Christensen, Hemphill, and Mustafakulov 1996.

15. For BMAC, see Hiebert 1994, 2002. Salvatori (2000) disagreed with Hicbert, suggest-
ing that BMAC began much earlier than 2100 BCE, and grew from local roots, not from an
intrusion from the south, making the growth of BMAC more gradual. For the BMAC graves at
Mehrgarh VIII, see Jarrige 1994. For BMAC materials in the Arabian Gulf, see Potts 2000,
During Caspers 1998; and Winckclmann 2000.

16. For tin-bronzes in Bactria and lead-copper alloys in Margiana, see Chernykh 1992:176-
182; and Salvatori et al. 2002. For the lead ingot at Sarazm, see Isakov 1994:8. For the Iranian
background, see Thornton and Lamberg-Karlovsky 2004.

17. For horse bones in BMAC, see Salvatori 2003; and Sarianidi 2002. For the BMAC seal
with the rider, see Sarianidi 1986. A few horses might have passed through the Caucasus into
western Iran before 3000 BCE, indicated by a few probable horse teeth at the site of Qabrcstan,
west of Teheran; see Mashkour 2003. No definite horse remains have been identified in eastern
Iran or the Indian subcontinent dated earlier than 2000 BCE. See Meadow and Patel 1997.

18. For the steppe sherds in BMAC sites, see Hiebert 2002. For the “Abashevo-1 ike "sherds
at Karnab, see Parzinger and Boroffka 2003:72, and Figure 49.

19. For Tugai, sec Hicbert 2002; E. Kuzmina 2003; and the original report, Avancssova
1996. The talc temper in two pots, an indication that they were made in the South Ural steppes,
is described in Avanessova 1996:122.

20. For Zardcha Khalifa, see Bobomulloev 1997; and E. Kuzmina 2001, 2003:224-225.

21. For the lead wires at Kuisak, see Maliutina and Zdanovich 1995:103. For the lapis bead
and the grave at Krasnoe Znamva, see E. Kuzmina 2001:20.

22. For Srubnaya subsistence, see Bunyaryan 2003 ; and Ostroshchenko 2003 .

23. For Chenopodium yields, see Smith 1989:1569.

24. For the Samara Valley Project, sec Anthony et al. 2006. The results obtained here were
replicated at Kibit, another Srubnaya settlement in Samara Oblast, excavated by L. Popova and
D. Peterson, where there was no cultivated grain and many seeds of Chenopodium .

25. For the enormous Srubnaya mining center at Kargaly, see Chernykh 1997, 2004. For the
mining center in Kazakhstan near Atasu, see Kadyrbaev and Kurmankulov 1992.

26. For stratigraphic relationships between Sintashta and Petrovka, see Vinogradov 2003;
and Kuzmina 2001:9. The Petrovka culture was a transitional culture marking the beginning of
the LBA. For Petrovka and its stratigraphic relationships to Alakul and Federovo, see Maliu-
tina 1991. I would like to acknowledge the difficulty of keeping all these P-k cultures straight:
on the middle Volga the MBA Poltavka culture evolved into final MBA Potapovka and then
into early LBA Pokrovka, which was contemporary with early LBA Petrovka in Kazakhstan.

27. For the north-south movements of nomads in Kazakhstan, sec Gorbunova 1993/94.

28. Sec Grigoriev 2002:78-84, for Petrovka metals.

29. For the Rostovka cemetery, see Matiushchenko and Sinitsyna 1988. For general discus-
sions in English, see Chernykh 1992:215-234; and Grigoriev 2002:192-205.

1

Notes to Chapter 16 505

30. For Seima-Turbino hollow-cast bronze casting and its influence on early China through
the Qijia culture of Gansu province, see Mei 2003a, 2003b; and Li 2002. Sec also Fitzgerald-
Hubcr 1995 and Linduff, Han, and Sun 2000.

31. See Epimakhov, Hanks, and Renfrew 2005 for dates. Seima-Turbino might possibly
have begun west of the Urals and spread eastward. Sintashta fortifications might then be seen as
a reaction to the emergence of Seima-Turbino warrior bands in the forest zone, but this is a
minority position; see Kuznetsov 2001.

32. For Alakul and Federovo elements on the same pot, see Maliutina 1984; for the strati-
graphic relations between the two, sec Maliutina 1991. For radiocarbon dates, see Parzinger
and Boroffka 2003:228.

33. E. Kuzmina 1994:207-208.

34. For Andronovo mines near Karaganda, see Kadyrbaev and Kurmankulov 1992; for
mines near Dzhezkazgan, sec Zhauymbacv 1984. For the estimate of copper production, sec
Chernykh 1992:21 2

35. For the Namazga VI pottery at Pavlovka, see Maliutina 1991:151-159.

36. For Andronovo sites in the Zeravshan, see Boroffka et al. 2002. For Tazabagyab sites on
the former Amu-Darya delta, see Tolstov and Kes 1960:89—132.

37. Hiebert 2002.

38. For the post-BMAC pastoral groups who made coarse incised ware, see Salvatori
2003:13; also Salvatori 2002. For the Vaksh and Bishkent groups, see Litvinsky and P’yankova
1992.

39. See Witzel 1995.

40. Books 2 and 4 of the Rig Veda referred to places in eastern Iran and Afghanistan. Book
6 described two clans who claimed they had come from far away, crossed many rivers, and gone
through narrow passages, fighting indigenous people referred to as Dasyus. These details sug-
gest that the Aryans fought their way into the Indian subcontinent from eastern Iran and Af-
ghanistan. Although some new elements such as horses can be seen moving from Central Asia
into the Indian subcontinent at this time, and intrusive pottery styles can be identified here
or there, no single material culture spread with the Old Indie languages. For discussions, see
Parpola 2002; Mallory 1998; and Witzel 1995:315-319.

41. For Jndra and Soma as loan words, see Lubotsky 2001. Indra combined attributes that
originally were separate: the mace was Mithras; some of his epithets, his martial power, and
perhaps his ability to change form were Verethraghna’s; and the slaying of the serpent was the
feat of the hero Thrataona, the Third One. The Old Indie poets gave these Indo-Iranian traits to
Indra. The most prominent aspect of Indo-Iranian Verethraghna, the god of might/victory, was
his shape-shifting ability, especially his form as the Boar. See Malandra 1983:80-81.

42. V. Sarianidi proposed that the people of the BMAC spoke Iranian. Sarianidi suggested
that “white rooms" inside the walled buildings at Togolok 21, Togolok 1, and Gonur were fire
temples like those of the Zoroastrians, with vessels containing Ephedra , Cannabis , and poppy
seeds, which he equated with Soma (RV) or Haoma (AV). But examinations of the seed and
stem impressions from the “white rooms" at Gonur and Togolok 21 by palcobotanists at Hel-
sinki and Leiden Universities proved that the vessels contained no Cannabis or Ephedra. Instead
the impressions probably were made by millet seeds and stems ( Panicum miliaceum)\ see Bakcls
2003. The BMAC culture makes a poor match with Indo-Iranian. The BMAC people lived in
brick-built fortified walled towns, depended on irrigation agriculture, worshiped a female deity
who was prominent in their iconography (a goddess with a flounced skirt), had few horses, no
chariots, did not build kurgan cemeteries, and did not place carefully cut horse limbs in their
graves.

43. Li 2002; and Mei 2003a.

jo 6 Notes to Chapter iy

Chapter 17 . Words and Deeds

1. Sec Diamond 1997.

2. Hobsbawm 1997:5-6: “For history is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or funda-
mentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction This state of af-

fairs affects us in two ways. We have a responsibility for historical facts in general and for
criticizing the politico-ideological abuse of history in particular.”

3. O’Flaherty 1981:69.

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Akhinzhalov, S. M., L. A. Makarova, and T. N. Nurumov. 1992. KIstorii Skotovodstva i Okkoty
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INDEX

f©

Abashevo culture, Russia, 378, 382-86, 389,
390, 395, 410, 413, 428, 431, 437, 447, 501-4
Acholi chiefdom, 117-18, 259, 478
Afanasievo culture, 267, 275, 307-11, 359,
443, 495, 496; and Tocharian languages,
264-65,305,311

Afro-Asiatic languages, 76, 136, 146, 304,
305, 475, 480, 495
allophone, 22
Amazons, 329, 497
amber, 355, 498

Anatolian languages, 14, 28, 43-48, 50, 52,

57, 60, 64, 75, 474; archaisms in, 46-48, 52,
82, 473, 495; in the Hittite empire, 43, 44,
45; internal diversity in, 44-46, 48, 53, 473;
non-Indo-European borrowings in, 44-45,
49, 473; and PIE homeland in Anatolia, 75-
81, 97-98, 100, 475; and steppe archaeology,
251, 259, 262, 265, 342, 492, 500
Andronovo horizon, 448-57; Alakul and
Federovo variants in, 448-49; link with
Central Asia, 452-56; mining and
metallurgy of, 450-51
areal borrowing. See language borrowing
Armenian language, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 60,
77,369, 411,462,472,495
Arslantepe, Turkey, 61-62, 67-68, 74, 283-
84, 289, 295, 474, 494
Aryans, 9-10, 18, 213, 375, 408-11, 465,

502, 505

Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex
(BM AC); chronology of, 504; economy of,
425; horses of, 415, 425, 427, 431, 504; link
to southern civilizations, 423, 425, 455-56;
link to steppe cultures, 427-36, 444, 452-
56, 504, 505; metal trade in, 391, 425, 413,
504; walled towns of, 414, 421, 424, 505
Bailey, Douglass, 227, 482, 488
Bal’ki kurgan, Ukraine, 70, 71, 74, 302, 316,

Baltic languages, 12, 13, 28, 29, 52, 55, 57,

60, 64, 82, 101, 306, 346, 348, 367, 380,
462, 479

Bantu languages, 80, 81, 114, 117, 137
Bernashevka settlement, Ukraine, 165,
166-73, 483
bit wear. See horses
Boas, Franz, 10, 114, 478
Bokonyi, Sandor, 62, 214, 474, 485, 487,

488, 492, 493, 495, 498
borders: ecological, 102, 114-16, 136-37,
148, 161, 216, 236, 463, 478; genetic,

105, 106-7, 113; linguistic, 41, 102-4,
107, 109, 114, 115, 131, 136-37, 146,

236, 238, 259, 305, 344, 368, 382, 385,
458, 463

Botai settlement, Kazakhstan. See horses
bows and bow remains, 55, 223-24, 236,

400, 488, 502

bride-price, 110-11, 117, 239, 317, 364,

478, 490

Bronocice, Poland, 62, 67, 68, 262, 311, 345
Budakalasz cemetery, Hungary, 68, 69, 74
Bug-Dniester culture, 144, 145, 147, 148,

159, 166, 480, 483; ceramics of, 148-49,
151; chronology of, 141, 151, 155, 156,

175, 483; diet of, 148, 151-54, 187, 481;
graves of, 157; settlements of, 148, 154

Cannabis, 264, 298, 362, 492, 494, 505
Caspian Depression, 136-37, 148, 149, 161,
182, 188, 199, 214, 295, 325, 483, 484
Catacomb culture, Russia and Ukraine, 70,
306, 307, 312, 322, 323, 325, 330, 336,
339, 369, 380, 383, 395, 437, 474, 496,

497, 504

Qatal Hiiyok tell, Turkey, 74, 198, 484
cattle raids, 91, 239, 364, 464, 499
Caucasian languages, 44, 49, 93, 97, 98,

187, 297,

cavalry, 18, 19, 222, 224, 236, 488, 489, 503
Celtic languages, 7, 28, 53, 55-56, 64, 88,
100, 105, 118, 160, 191, and archaeology,
305, 344, 367, 476, 500
Cernavoda I and III cultures, Romania, 62,
221, 228, 241, 260-62, 269, 341, 349, 354,
362,491,492,499

54$ Index

Index

549

chariots: in China, 403, 456; and Indo-
Europeans, 18, 48, 133, 213, 448, 456; in
the Near East, 397, 399, 400, 402-3,
417-18, 427, 431, 502, 503; in the Sintashta
culture, 371, 376-77, 399-405, 408, 441;
size, 399; in warfare, 397-405, 462, 502
cheekpicces. See horses
Chenopodium (goosefoot) seeds in diet, 176,
303, 326, 405, 439, 497, 504
Clayton, Hilary, 193, 194, 195, 485
climate change and human ecology, 110, 136,
164, 197, 227-28, 230, 247, 258, 300-301,
389-91, 416, 440, 488, 489, 495, 501
contracts, 45, 191, 326, 342, 366, 370
copper metallurgy, 125, 163, 185, 225, 228,
263, 290, 336, 382, 389, 482, 484
Corded Ware horizon, 306, 344, 345, 360,
367-68, 375, 377, 380, 382, 475, 500, 501
core vocabulary. See language borrowing
Cotsofeni culture, Romania, 241, 344, 345,
355, 357, 362, 363, 366, 498
creole languages. See language borrowing
Cri§ culture, 104, 139-47, 149, 151, 152,

153, 154, 156, 158, 167, 187, 203, 479,

480, 481,483

Csepel-Haros settlement, Hungary, 203,

204, 367

Cucuteni C pottery, 164, 231-34, 236, 252,
260, 489-90

Cucutcni-Tripolye culture, 84, 104, 105, 159,
164-73, 267, 368; cemeteries of, 167, 234-
35, 264, 277, 350, 489; its contact with
steppe cultures, 175, 177, 229, 230-39,
242-45, 252, 254, 257, 267, 269, 273,
346-49, 349-54, 489, 491, 498; copper
metallurgy in, 163, 172-73, 181,254, 273;
craft specialization in, 229, 233, 281, 351,
489, 493; early settlements of, 166-74,

226, 483; economy of, 172, 351-53; female
figurines of, 164, 171-72, 305; fortifica-
tions of, 230-31, 239, 281, 489; geo-
graphic expansion of, 159, 173, 232, 236,
264, 346, 491; giant towns of, 266, 277,

278- 82, 493; late settlements of, 346-49,

279- 82, 302, 344-48, 351, 353, 360, 377,
493, 500; origins of, 164-66

daggers, 132, 228, 462, 499, 500, 501; in
Central Asia, 420, 425, 427; in Cotsofeni,
366; in Maikop culture, 284, 291, 293,
297-98; in Seima-Turbino, 443, 444, 446,
447; in Sintashta, 372, 395, 399, 400; in

Usatovo, 349, 353, 355-57, 359; in
Yamnaya, 298, 304, 309, 319, 325, 334-36
Dereivka, Ukraine, 165, 237, 240, 299, 487;
age and sex of horses, 204-6, 485; bit wear
on horses, 213-15; Dnieper-Doncts II
cemetery, 169, 175, 179, 483; size of
horses, 202-4, 214, 488, 498; Sredni Stog
cemetery, 245, 258; Sredni Stog settle-
ment, 241-49, 273, 274, 490, 491
Dcrgachev, Valentin, 140, 152, 173, 230, 232,
235, 480, 481, 483, 489, 491, 498, 499
DiCosmo, Nicola, 322, 393, 460, 478, 491,
496, 502

Divine Twins, 50, 55, 134, 456, 479
Dnieper-Donets I Neolithic culture,

Ukraine, 155-56, 481
Dnieper-Donets II Eneolithic culture,
Ukraine, 168, 174-82, 187, 481, 482, 483
Dnieper Rapids, Ukraine, 142, 144, 149, 155,
157-59, 174-75, 176, 179, 201, 239, 246,
258,268,271,272

dogs, 176, 213, 215, 222, 248, 293, 324, 356,
376, 493, 501; and canine tooth ornaments,

362, 364-65, 411, 499; midwinter dog
sacrifice of, 239, 364, 410-411; in Proto-
Indo-European, 15, 56, 91, 94, 410, 503

Drews, Robert, 97, 473, 485, 488, 490, 500,
503

Dumezil, Georges, 92-93, 359

Elamites, 413-14, 416-19, 423, 425, 431,

433, 454, 503

Elshanka Neolithic settlement, Russia, 139,
141,149,150, 480
Equus caballus. See horses
Equus bemionus or onager, 136, 137, 158, 176,
186, 188, 198-99, 218, 275, 291, 298, 388,
402-4, 413, 417, 425, 482, 484, 503
Equus bydruntinus , 136, 148, 198, 199, 491
Evdik kurgan, Russia, 68, 69, 74, 268, 283,
295, 297, 312, 320, 496

Fatyanovo culture, Russia, 377, 379-83, 395,
396

felt textiles, 60, 98, 137, 175, 298, 312, 330,

363, 461

Flintbek cemetery, Germany, 66, 74
frontiers, persistent, 17, 104-8, 112, 116,

119, 154, 158, 161, 297, 306, 463, 477, 478

Galugai settlement, Russia, 266, 268, 283,
290, 298, 494

Gamkrelidzc, T., 97, 473, 474, 476, 495
Gei, Aleksandr, 71, 312, 313, 322, 329, 337,
475, 484, 496

gender and power, 10, 15, 92, 138, 328, 329,
479

George, Christian, 206, 207, 211, 213, 486
Germanic languages, 8, 10, 12, 14, 28, 29,

31, 37, 40, 53, 56, 82, 88, 101, 105-6, 134,

472, 476, 494, 495; and the Corded Ware
horizon, 367-68; and the Usatovo culture,
343, 348, 359-60

Gimbutas, Marija, 10, 83, 132, 162, 170,

180, 214, 230, 240, 458, 489, 494, 495;
and the Kurgan culture, 214-15, 306-7,
319, 475; and Old Europe, 132, 162-64,
214, 225-30, 482

glottochronologv. See language change
Gonur walled town, Turkmenistan, 413, 414,
421,424-29, 431,452,505
Grant, Madison, 9, 465
Greek language, 32, 48-49; link to Indo-
Iranian, 55-56, 237, 411, 473; Mycenaean
origins, 32, 48-50, 368-69, 397, 401, 402,
411, 437, 447, 472, 492, 500, 502; non-
Greek borrowings in, 88, 473, 476
Greek Neolithic, 138, 139, 143, 146-47, 173,
259, 480

Grimm’s Law, 29, 472

guest-host relationship, 31, 32, 191, 303, 327,
342,343,361,461,464,465,495
Gumeinifa culture, Romania, 163, 165, 226,
244, 261, 491

Harappan civilization, 413-16, 419, 423,

425, 440, 503

Hausler, Alexander, 214, 215, 474, 487, 497
Herder, J. G. 8

Hittite language and empire, 13, 14, 18, 36,
43-48, 50, 60, 76, 79, 134, 238, 262, 336,

473, 490, 495

Hobsbawm, Eric, 103, 465, 476, 506
honey and honey-bees, 14, 90-92, 98, 99,
164, 303, 384, 476, 492
horizon styles, 131-32, 222, 237, 260-61, 272,
275, 300, 302, 303-4, 305, 307, 312, 317,
327, 336, 367, 410, 435, 443, 448, 450, 457
horses, 6, 15, 18-19, 90-91, 98, 213, 459;
behavior and ecology of, 135-36, 196-99,
200, 287, 299, 325, 388, 425, 479, 485,
488, 491, 494, 497, 498, 503, 504, 505; bit
wear on, 193-96, 206-15, 218, 22 1, 485,
486, 488; at Borai, 202, 204, 216-20, 264,

266, 308, 388-89, 441, 487, 488; chariot
teams of, 49, 224, 397-405, 418, 433, 462;
cheekpieces for, 242, 369, 400-402, 502;
at Dereivka, 213-15, 247, 487; in diet, 148,
158, 175-76, 186, 188-89, 198-99, 200,
204-6, 213, 216-17, 247-48, 274, 291,
298, 310, 351, 389, 406, 429, 449, 460,

487; DNA studies on, 196, 485; domesti-
cation of, 18-19, 21, 175, 193 ff., 200-201,
219, 22 1, 260, 299; dung of, 219-20;
hunting of, 137, 148, 158, 161, 176, 186,
188, 189, 198-99, 200, 216-18, 220, 275;
maceheads shaped like, 234-35, 251, 254,
256, 489, 491; riding of, 73, 118, 133,
206-15, 222-24, 230, 237, 246, 249,
301-2, 342, 416, 418, 454, 459-60, 475,
490, 503; in ritual, 55, 91, 133, 160, 179,
183-84, 188-90, 205, 215, 287, 284,
291-92, 304, 324-25, 342, 372, 406-7,
409, 427, 446, 455, 479, 484; stature of,
202-4, 237, 460, 488; trade in, 264, 274,
284, 298, 341-42, 351, 361, 412, 416-17,
421, 425, 427, 431, 452; in war, 222-24,
228, 239, 259, 342, 397-405, 433, 501
hundred, Proto-Indo-European root, 13, 23,
27-30, 33, 36, 52
Hurrian language, 49-50, 76, 454

Icelandic language, 22-23, 41

Igren settlements and cemetery, Ukraine,

144, 155, 165, 174, 241, 244, 246, 247
Indra, 49, 50, 55, 92, 454-56, 505
Indo-Iranian, 51-53, 55, 57, 82, 91, 134,
305-6, 369, 409-10, 450, 454-55, 473, 500,
505; and Abashevo culture, 501; and Balto-
Slavic, 52, 101; and Greek, 55-56, 237, 369,
492; and Proto-Uralic, 94-95, 385; and
Sintashta culture, 408-10, 435, 455-56, 503
Iranian, Avestan languages, 31, 35, 51-52,
450, 454-56, 473

iron metallurgy in the steppes, 334, 335, 336,
498

Italic languages, 12, 14, 28, 53, 55-57, 64,

82, 91, 101, 134, 160, 305, 344, 367, 370,
495, 500

Ivanov, V., 97, 473, 474, 476, 493, 495
Ivanovskaya settlement, Russia, 165, 189,

199, 485

javelins, 252, 257, 259, 374, 395, 396, 399,
400, 403, 405, 417, 462, 502
Jones, Sir William, 6-8

55 °

Kair Shak settlement, Russia, 142, 144, 149,
150, 158,216

Kanesh tell, Turkey, 43-46, 403, 404, 413
Kara Khuduk settlement, Russia, 164, 170,
182, 186, 188, 266, 268, 275, 276, 319, 493
Karagash kurgan, Kazakhstan, 308-9, 495
Karakol kurgan, Altai Mts. 308, 310, 496
Karanovo tell, Bulgaria: Eneolithic
occupation, 163, 165, 172, 225, 226-27,
229, 238, 241, 254, 489; Neolithic
occupation, 138, 146

Karnab tin mine, Uzbekistan, 414, 420, 423,

428, 431,452,504

Kartvelian languages, 97-99, 187, 477
Kelteminar culture, 388, 413, 419, 435, 501-4
Kemi-Oba culture, Crimea, 271, 283, 291,
298, 302, 321, 336, 339, 363, 398
Kerberos, 56

Ketegyhaza kurgan, Hungary, 62, 221, 345,
348, 362

Khvalynsk culture, 62, 165, 181, 182-86,216,
266, 297, 308, 318, 320; animal sacrifices,
62, 184, 185. 201, 237, 239, 474, 484;
cemeteries, 182-84, 189, 190, 274, 319, 493;
chronology, 168-69, 182, 213, 240, 266,
274, 275, 276, 482, 483, 484; copper
metallurgy, 185, 484; diet, 186, 188, 191,
275; social hierarchy, 180, 185, 239, 254
Kikkuli , horse trainer, 49
Konstantinovka settlement, Ukraine, 268,
274, 283, 296-98, 319
Korios , or Mannerbunde war bands, 364-65,
410, 499

Kozhai 1 settlement, Kazakhstan, 218
Krasnosamarskoe settlement and kurgan
cemetery, Russia, 316, 329, 330, 331, 332,
410-11, 422, 436, 438, 449, 440, 504
Krivoe Ozero kurgan cemetery, Russia, 375,
376, 390, 391, 395, 399, 402, 425, 428,

429, 441, 447, 502

Kugat settlement, Russia, 144, 149, 150
Kurgan culture. See also Yamnava horizon,
306-7, 495

Kuzmina, Elena, 235, 384, 429, 484, 485,
488, 502, 503, 504, 505
Kuznetsov, Pavel F., 333, 434, 496, 498, 505

language borrowing: areal borrowing, 88, 97,
475; in core vocabulary, 40-42, 472, 473;
and creole languages, 16, 87, 476; in other
domains, 15-16, 23, 41, 57, 77, 86-88,
93-98, 99, 476; in place-names, 88, 476

Index

language change (or evolution), 22-27, 79,
117; sound change, 13, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29,
31; speed of, or glottochronology, 39-42
language shift (or adoption): causes, 117-20,
340-41, 492, 498; prehistoric, 258-59,
340-43, 365-68

Latin language, 7, 13, 23, 26-28, 31, 40, 55,
303, 462, 476, 495
Lehman, Winfrid, 21
Levine, Marsha, 201, 205, 206, 214, 215,
217, 218, 219, 240, 483, 485, 486, 487,
500, 501

Linear B inscriptions, 32, 49
Linear Pottery culture, 78, 104, 105, 141,
154, 164, 166, 187, 471, 481, 490
Lohne-Ziischen tomb, Germany, 67, 69, 74

maces and mace-heads, 160, 180, 182, 183,
185, 186, 188, 191, 222, 234-35, 239, 251,
252 , 254-57. 259, 275, 298, 333, 372, 595,
400, 460, 489, 491,498,505
Maidanets’ke settlement, Ukraine, 266, 268,
278, 280, 493

Maikop culture, North Caucasus, 84, 98,
263, 283, 287 ff., 302, 307; chronology,
266, 269, 270, 274, 290-91, 294, 494-
graves, 287-92, 494 horses, 221, 291, 298,
494; language, 98, 297; metals, 273, 288-
89, 291-92, 294, 298; origins, 187, 263,
285-87, 494; and southern civilizations,
284, 287-90, 293-95, 388, 420, 494; and
steppe cultures, 263-64, 267, 270, 273,
274, 287, 295-99, 312, 319, 329, 353-54,
461, 492, 494, 498, 499
Mallory, Jim, 22, 80, 83, 118, 214, 311, 328,
329, 338, 370, 458, 471, 473, 475, 478,

479, 490, 495, 497, 498, 505
Malyan tell, Iran (ancient Anshan) 196, 283,
413, 414, 416, 417, 418, 433, 454, 503
Mariupol cemetery, Ukraine, 165, 179, 180,
181, 187, 216, 241, 247, 267, 483-84
matrilineality. See gender and power
Matveev Kurgan settlement, Ukraine, 142,
144, 149, 199, 216, 481-82, 484
Melchert, Craig, 46, 48, 472, 473
Middle Dnieper culture, 277-79, 344, 347,
348, 351, 354, 368, 377-81, 413, 500
migration, 17, 73, 140, 213, 214, 215, 307-8,
322, 366, 433, 439, 443, 458, 478, 501;
causes, 110-111, 255, 364; charter groups,
112-13, 478; chain migration, 112-13,

117, 138; effects on language, 75, 78, 80,

Index

100, 106-7, 109, 112, 117-19, 146-47, 259,
264, 311, 361, 365, 367, 369, 380; effects
on material culture, 109, 112-13, 365, 498;
elite group migrations, 251, 255, 256, 295;
folk migrations, 108, 111, 119, 146, 232,

305, 307,344, 361,480
Mikhailovka 1 Late Eneolithic culture,
Ukraine, 266, 268-71, 279, 281, 283, 287,
291, 339, 349, 492, 493, 496
Mikhailovka II Early Bronze Age settle-
ment, Ukraine, 266, 302, 320-21, 324,

353, 371, 492, 496

Mitanni kingdom, Syria, 49-50, 403, 454
Mokhrablur settlement, Armenia, 221, 298
Moliukhor Bugor settlement, Ukraine, 216,
241, 242, 244, 247-48, 268, 273, 277, 491

,S N in human bone, 127, 168, 169, 175, 176,
182, 186, 291, 330, 334, 406, 467-70, 482,
483, 484, 494, 495

Nalchik cemeteries, Russia: Early Bronze
Age kurgan, 283, 291, 294, 302, 339;
Eneolithic cemetery, 165, 186-87, 188,

190, 268,285, 484*

Nichols, Johanna, 96, 98, 116, 458, 472, 475,
476, 477, 478, 480

Nikol’skoe cemetery, Ukraine, 168, 176,
178-80, 181, 182, 201, 254, 448, 483
nomads and nomadic pastoralism, 60, 135,
236-37, 254, 321-22, 327, 393, 443, 459,
460-61,489, 491,496, 504
Novosvobodnaya kurgan cemetery, Russia,

62, 63, 69, 268, 282, 290-92, 294-99,

302, 312, 317, 319, 332, 336, 339, 354,

356, 474, 494, 496, 497
Nuer pastoralists, Africa, 110-11, 317, 478

oaths in Indo-European, 191, 259, 342
Old Europe, 132-33, 162, 174, 185, 214,
225-30, 234-37, 240, 244, 251, 255, 258,
460, 482, 488, 490

Olsen, Sandra, 218, 219, 220, 485, 486, 487
Ostanni kurgan, Russia, 71, 74, 302, 313, 316

Pathan tribe and language shift, 118, 1 19,

259, 366, 478, 492
patrilineal ity. See gender and power
Persian language, 6, 9, 12, 51
Peschanyi Dol herding camps, Russia, 325,

423, 437, 438

Pctrovka culture, Middle Bronze Age,

Russia, 390, 397, 399, 400, 413, 428-31,

55 '

433, 441-43, 444, 446-50, 455-56, 462,
502, 504

Phrygian language, 13, 34, 52, 53, 57, 369, 411
Plachidol kurgan, Bulgaria, 338, 345, 348,
361,362,364, 365,499
poetry in Indo-European, 55, 56, 118, 135,
265, 331, 343, 405, 409, 410, 462, 479
Pokrovka phase of the Late Bronze Age,
Russia, 422-23, 437, 439, 488, 496, 504
Polivanov Yar settlement, Ukraine, 226, 229,
241, 489, 493

Poltavka culture, Middle Bronze Age,

Russia, 306, 316, 326, 327, 329-31, 334,
335, 374, 379, 383, 386-87, 389, 390, 395,
440, 497, 501, 504

Post-Mariupol culture, Ukraine, 267, 271—
73, 274, 279, 287, 321, 336, 493, 498
Potapovka culture. Middle Bronze Age,
Russia, 327, 375-77, 382, 386, 390, 396,
401, 402, 409-10, 433-34, 435, 437, 440,
469, 501, 504

praise of the gift, 118, 331, 343
Proto-Indo-European language, 5, 8-11, 12,
14-15, 17, 19, 46, 75, 99, 115, 160, 186,
191, 238, 259, 277, 297, 300-306, 311,

317, 328, 331, 342, 360, 368, 461, 471,

473, 476, 495; beginning date, 59, 63-72,
77-81, 99; cladistic analyses of, 56-58, 77;
homeland, 83-91, 93-99, 105, 132; link to
Caucasian, 97-98; link to Proto-Uralic,
93-97; phases within, 43, 48, 56, 77;
reconstruction of, 21-33, 35, 38, 42;
religion in, 134-35, 364, 410; terminal
date, 39, 42, 46, 50-52, 99

race, 5, 8-9, 10, 11, 463, 475
radiocarbon dating, 66, 126-28, 175, 290,
330, 458, 467-70

Rakushcchni Yar settlement, llkraine, 142,
144, 149, 158, 165, 169, 188, 480, 481, 482
Rassamakin, Y., 240, 242, 271, 272, 483,
484, 489, 490, 491, 492, 493, 494, 498
Razdorskoe settlement, Russia, 274, 301,

484, 493

Renfrew, Colin, 75-81, 97, 118, 464, 470,
472, 474, 476, 478, 480, 488, 500, 504
Repin Late Eneolithic culture, Russia, 266,
267, 268, 274-77, 283, 297, 302, 305, 307-9,
310, 317-20, 324-25, 483, 493, 495, 496
Rig Veda, 7, 9, 10, 11, 49-51, 56, 224, 342,
374, 402, 405, 408, 411, 454-56, 462, 466,
471,473, 498,500, 502,505

jp Index

Ringc, Don, 56, 57, 65, 474, 476
Romantic movement, 6
Rostovka cemetery, Siberia, 413, 444, 436,
447, 504

ruki rule, 52, 55, 56

Samara Early Eneolithic culture, Russia,

189, 190, 484

Samara Valley Project, 316, 325, 437, 459,
497, 504

Samsonovka settlement, Ukraine, 149, 302,
324

Sanskrit language, 7, 9, 11, 18, 22, 29-30,
47, 64, 454-56; links with Sintashta
culture, 408-10, 412; non-Indo-Iranian
borrowed vocabulary, 11, 454-56, 505;
Old Indie phase, 18, 31, 34, 36, 49-51,

57, 134, 160, 403, 408, 435, 454-56,

462, 473
Sapir, Edward, 5

Sarazm tell, Tajikistan, 283, 289, 308, 387-
88, 393, 413-14, 419-21, 428, 430, 431,
433-34, 462, 501, 504
satam languages, 27-29, 52, 55, 56, 411, 472
Schleicher, August, 21
Scythians, 51, 103, 214, 215, 223, 321, 322,
329, 341, 440

Se Girdan tombs, Iran, 283, 294-95, 494
secondary products revolution, 73-74, 262
Scima-Turbino culture, 390, 413, 434,
443-48, 505

Sergeivka settlement, Kazakhstan, 388-89,
390, 441, 501

Shar-i Sokhta tell, Iran, 63, 413, 414
Sherratt, Andrew, 73, 260, 298, 363, 471
Shulaveri settlement, Georgia, 165, 186,
187

Sintashta culture, Russia: animal sacrifices,
375, 405-8; cemeteries, 371, 407-8;
chariots, 397-408, 417, 431, 462, 502;
chronology, 374, 376-77, 441, 447, 502,
504; economy, 405-7, 440, 502, 503;
fortified settlements, 371-73, 385, 390-91,
440, 505; link to Central Asia, 412, 417,
421, 427-35, 454-57; link to Indo-Iranian,
408-11, 412, 503; metals, 375, 383,
391-93, 395, 421, 443, 444; origins, 306,
382-83, 385-87, 389-93; sources, 500;
weapons, 393-96

Slavic languages, 13, 28, 52, 55, 57, 60, 64,
77, 82, 101, 259, 306, 307, 346, 348, 367,
368, 380, 476, 495, 500

social hierarchy among steppe herders, 133,
154, 160-62, 178-82, 184-85, 191, 331-
34, 341-43, 350-51, 355-59, 405-8
Soroki settlements, Ukraine, 141, 144, 149,
151, 152,266, 481
sound change. See language change
Spondylus shell ornaments, 143, 147, 173,
181,225,228

Sprachbund. See language borrowing
Sredni Stog I, Early Eneolithic settlement,
Ukraine, 174, 176, 239, 240, 244
Sredni Stog II, Late Eneolithic culture,
Ukraine: cemeteries, 245-46, 258, 274;
ceramics, 234, 240, 242, 244, 245, 286,
297, 491; chronology, 239-40, 241-44,
273-74, 483, 484, 490; origins, 240-47;
relations with the North Caucasus, 286,
297, 319; relations with Old Europe, 234,
236-39, 240, 249-53, 258, 260, 264, 268,
269, 273, 277-79, 281, 348, 380, 489; role
of horses, 202-4, 213, 214, 240, 247-49,
273-74, 488, 491, 498; settlements, 248,
249, 273, 274, 490, 491
Srubnaya culture, Russia, 436-441, 454;
chronology and growth, 306, 410, 422-23,
433, 435, 437; copper mines, 441, 504;
diet, 327, 439-40, 504; dog sacrifice, 410-
11; graves, 323, 439; settlements, 322, 325,
437-39, 441

Surskii Neolithic settlement, Ukraine, 142,
144, 149, 155, 174, 175, 483
Suvorovo-Novodanilovka complex, Ukraine
and Danube, 228, 230, 237, 241, 244, 245,
249-59, 261, 263, 271, 286, 287, 460, 461,
491, 492; and Anatolian languages, 259,
262; and Bolgrad culture, 255-56; copper
objects, 250-52, 253-54, 491, 492; at
Csongrad, 241, 252, 255; at Decea
Mure$ului, 235, 241, 250, 254, 255;
kurgan graves, 252-53, 256-58; and the
North Caucasus, 263, 286; and horse-head
maces, 234-35, 254

Svobodnoe settlement, North Caucasus, 62,
241, 243, 252, 258, 268, 269, 285-87, 474,
494

Swadesh, Morris, 40-41, 472
S’yezzhc cemetery, Russia, 165, 182, 189-91,
201,216, 484

Tarim Basin, China, 55, 65, 308, 311, 456
Tashkovo II settlement, Russia, 389, 390,
413, 444

Index S53

Telegin, D.Y., 174, 178, 180, 181, 213, 215,
235, 240, 242, 244, 246, 249, 251, 297,
314, 317, 318, 319, 321, 330, 338, 480,

481, 483, 484, 487, 489, 490, 491, 492,
496, 498, 499, 500

Three Age system, 123-24, 125-26, 130,

161, 290, 479

tin trade, 124, 391, 413, 417, 418-21, 425,
428, 443-46, 447, 450, 452, 456, 460,

462, 503, 504

Tocharian languages, 13, 14, 28, 34, 54, 55,
56, 57, 64-65, 77, 82, 101, 191, 264, 265,
305, 307, 311, 342, 344, 490, 496
tree diagrams, 56, 57, 100, 348, 471
Trichterbecker (TRB) culture, Poland, 67,
247, 262, 348, 360, 367-68, 494
Trito myth, 134, 239, 364
Troy citadel, Turkey, 45, 69, 262, 290, 336,
338, 354-55, 473, 497

Tugai settlement, Uzbekistan, 388, 413, 414,
428-33, 452, 455, 504

turquoise trade, 263, 283, 289, 294, 295, 388,
419-20, 421, 425, 452, 490

Ur III kingdom, 403, 413, 414-17, 421, 427,
431, 502

Uralic languages, 80, 93-96, 98, 99, 385, 476
Uruk, Iraq, 62, 263, 282-84, 289-90, 294,
298, 322, 493, 495; and invention of the
wheel, 66-67, 74, 282; and wool, 61-62, 474
Usatovo culture, Ukraine, 349-60; ceramics,
351-354; chronology, 347-48; economy,
351-53, 354-55; glass beads, 354; graves,
350, 355-59; metals, 354-55; social
organization, 350-51, 355-59

Varfolomicvka settlement, Russia, 142, 144,
158, 165, 170, 180, 182, 186, 188, 189,

191, 199, 201, 214, 216, 234, 254, 481,

483, 484

Varna cemetery, Bulgaria, 163, 165, 185,
225-27, 229, 235, 238, 243, 256, 257, 258,
361, 362, 363, 488, 491
Vasiliev, Igor B., 182, 190, 276, 335, 434, 480,
481, 483, 484, 485, 487, 493, 496, 497
Vehik, Susan, 255, 393, 488, 490, 491, 502
Verethraghna , god of victory, 454, 505
Vinogradov, Nikolai, 394, 399, 429, 500,

501, 502, 504

Volosovo forager culture, Russia, 380, 382,
385, 390, 501

warfare, 18, 119, 137, 222-24, 488, 491,

502; in the Abashevo culture, 383, 385; in
the BMAC, 454, 462; in the end of Old
Europe, 228, 230, 237-39, 249, 255,

258-60, 281, 489, 493; in the Sintashta
culture, 391, 393-405; in Ur III 417, 503;
in the Yamnaya horizon, 342, 364-65,

342, 499

wheels, 6, 59, 459; on battle wagons in
Mesopotamia, 417-18; invention and
diffusion of, 65-75, 133, 282, 284, 287,

291, 295, 297, 317, 385, 475, 503; Proto-
Indo-European terms for, 33-36, 63-65,

78, 81, 100, 474, 475; significance of, 7
2-73, 81, 302, 459, 461, 500; spoked, 372,
374, 397, 399, 402-4, 459; in wagon
graves, 69-72, 295, 312, 332, 362-63, 425,
427, 496
wine, 236, 495

Wolf, Eric, 106-8, 477, 478, 479
wool, 15, 59-63, 66, 73, 81, 91, 98, 137, 175,
261, 263, 264, 269, 282, 284, 285, 292,

294, 298, 351, 456, 471, 474, 492, 493

Yamnaya horizon, Ukraine and Russia, 133,

299, 300 ff.; cemeteries in, 280-81, 303,

304, 309, 319, 329-30, 332, 336-39;
chronology of, 272, 275, 306, 314-16, 321,
493, 496; east-west differences in, 304-5,

320, 324, 386; economy of, 312-17,

320-28, 440, 497; metals in, 311, 334-36,
497; origins of, 275, 299, 300-303, 317-19,
496; settlements in, 304, 320, 324, 325;
social organization in, 303-4, 317, 328-29,
331-34, 341-43, 364-65, 459, 492, 495,

497; wagon graves in, 69-73, 311-17, 332,
362-64, 496

Yamnaya migrations, 305-6, 312-17,

320-28, 325, 340 ff, 364-65, 461; to the
Altai Mts., 307-11; to the Danube valley,
361-65, 499; to the middle Dnieper, 375,

377, 380, 500; to the Tripolyc region, 280,
343-48, 359-60, 367-68, 498
Yasinovatka cemetery, Ukraine, 165, 169,

175, 179, 180-82, 189, 483

Zarathustra, 51, 408, 473

Zeder, Melinda, 195, 196, 416, 485, 503

Zeus, 31,262

Zvelebil, Marek, 153, 475, 477, 480, 481,

483

(wtt V.